Abstract EN:

Second-hand dealers are part of French people's familiar environment, but they are also individuals who are difficult to define, members of a group with its own rules and rites. Their universe is outside time and society where none the less they have an important part to play: recycling, trading memories. Thanks to a personal experience of eight years in the Gulf of St-Tropez, the author has been able to study closely this world on the fringe of society, which, behind the picturesqueness, reveals a combination of diversified individualities for whom the master words are: freedom and profit. Contrary to what they imagine, second-hand dealers are not the holders of some special wisdom allowing them to look down on the common run of mankind, but they make the most of any scraps of knowledge they possess. In the Gulf of St-Tropez, confronted with wealthy customers they envy and despise, second-hand dealers show their true face of people who have come down in the world. Today their trade is not what it was, and in a world where everything is bought and then thrown away, these champions of durability give the impression of a near to extinct tribe. But dealing in second-hand goods remains the last refuge of those who have no skills and allows numerous misfits of modem society to find a legitimate trade. Dealers in truth and falsehood, in illusions or childhood memories, they are difficult to dislodge. However, their place is being inexorably eaten away by current fashions even if, for some of them, the dice are not cast.