Abstract EN:

I explore social relations between activists and people they help. An historical study, back to the 19th century pattern, explains first the two forms of these relations: philanthropy and trade-unionism. Then I report the results of a fieldwork survey in committees of Parisian suburbs on an activist movement focusing on the issue of housing (DAL) and show how the different models of relation with suffering others are tensed. I present the groups meeting in the association: people with poor housing and the activists who don't act only because of moral indignation. Activists, the dominant group impose their own frame to poor housing people who are supposed to mobilize on an offensive and collective basis, as well as trade-unionists in France do. This injunction is a paradoxe because most of them don't belong to the group of poor housing. However they manage to pull activists toward their own project (to be helped and re-housed) and to win political sense, self confidence and emancipation.