Abstract EN:

The "old working-class neighbourhood" is an important theme in saint-etienne's 20th century imagery and historiography. The outlying neighbourhood "le soleil" developed in the 1840’s. , because of the growing coal-mining industry, but without any mining company buildings. For a century, most of the male inhabitants worked in the pits, but there was a growing number of iron and steel workers after the 1870s. Women worked in the town-cenre, in the silk and textile industry, and later as office whitecollar workers. After a statistical approach, the social structure of the neighbourhood is studied through the history of about fifty families from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The prosopographic analysis of the families emphasizes the geographical stability in the neighbourhood, as well as the lack of professional mobility over 3,4 or 5 generations. These forms of stability are an important basic element in social identity until the pre-second world war years. Oral interviews of about forty old male and female workers have made it possible to define a french working-class memory of years of social and cultural change in the first half of the 20th century. The inquiry focuses on various themes: work in the mine industry; jobs and skilled trades; life-style and neighbourhood; sexual-social relationships between men and women, especially in women's working life cycles; immigration; religious and ideological cleavages. In this working-class memory, social identity, deeply connected with the neighbourhood's spatial and temporal dimensions, often seems to correspond to chronologically undefined transient "golden year