Le « tournant de la rigueur » comme processus régulatoire

This article studies the “turn towards austerity” taken by French President Mitterrand in March 1983 from a sociological angle. Interpreting this key episode in French political history as a regulation process, it shows how that process resulted not only from external economic constraints and the French elites’ conversion to neoliberalism but also collective decision-making actions. Drawing on different empirical corpuses (archives, directories, participant accounts), it identifies the economic policy contours of the controversy. After establishing the list of actors who took part in the decision-making, it analyzes their positions in social and relational structures, stressing the importance that forms of social, political, and state-level status assumed in the unfolding of the controversy and showing the relational work done by some actors while bringing to light the scope and importance of such phenomena as homophily, intermediacy, status competition, and social niche construction in the framework of this regulatory process.