ABSTRACT
The years since the Second World War have seen deeper and more rapid social changes in France than at any time, perhaps, since the Revolution of 1789. The rural exodus has been completed; most French people now live in towns, and those that remain in the country have had their lives transformed by the provision of public utilities and the modernization of agricultural methods; and town and country have been brought closer together by vast infrastructural improvements in public transport and telecommunications. The nature of work has changed, as has the composition of the work-force; the age structure of the population has altered and, with it, people’s aspirations and expectations. The social structure familiar from the pre-war period, with its seemingly rigid divisions between ‘owners’ and ‘bourgeois’ and its significant numbers of ‘paysans’ or people working on the land, has been profoundly altered both by the disappearance of the traditional working class composed of male heavy-industry workers and their families, and by the concomitant growth of tertiary sector employment, together with the emergence of significant new social actors such as young people, old people, immigrants and the poor. Mass secondary education and the mass media have undoubtedly had a homogenizing effect and the cultural specificities which attached to earlier social divisions, with distinguishably different ‘bourgeois’ and ‘working-class’ cultures, have been attenuated. At the same time, other forms of cultural diversity have emerged which are based on regional, generational and ethnic differences.
