ABSTRACT
Le pays légal is the official nation as opposed to le pays réel, the ‘real’ one. If the politics of social work often masqueraded as ‘non-polities’, or could be viewed by participants as ‘politically neutral’, that was partly because of the way politics was encoded during the Third Republic. Weighing a baby at the neighbourhood clinic might not look like part of the political process, either to the child’s parents or the health visitor operating the scales; but with a broad definition of the political, the historian has no problem arguing that that is just what it was. This chapter looks critically at the politics/non-politics boundary: on one hand, surveying some of the formal mechanisms of decision-making, within le pays légal; on the other, noting the diversity of pressure group politics with roots in le pays réel. As the quotation suggests, one might expect to find men in charge of the former, with women appearing, if at all, in the latter.
