COAL AND ITS MEN. TENSIONS, COORDINATION AND COMPROMISE IN THE SOCIOTECHNICAL NETWORK OF COAL EXPLOITATION IN THE BRIANÇON ALPS FROM THE 18th - 20th CENTURIES
Between the beginning of the 18th century and the 1970s, that is for more than two and a half centuries, a network of relationships developed in the Briançon Alps between a natural resource, coal, and a human population of peasants and mountain men. This study endeavours to give an account of these relations and to run through the chain of associations by means of which peasants and coal have simultaneously invented each other. In so doing, they constituted a " socio-natural complex " characterised by particular forms of exploitation, namely the charbonnières, which long cohabited with the small industrial mines that were gradually created in the Briançon basin. The network of coal exploitation activities by peasants is addressed through four associations that are looked at successively. The first is the relationship with coal and its naturalisation as suitable-coal. The second is the " communalist appropriation " of State-based coal exploitation concessions. The third association is the stabilisation of a sociotechnical mechanism offering a third way to the socio-economic alternative faced by mountains populations, that is, either to emigrate or to stay and suffer the 'hard labour' of industrial mining. The fourth association is an instrumental relationship with technology, that is, the practical and discursive equipment of the rational and industrial mine introduced by mine engineers. This account is devoid of social structures, of technical systems other than those mobilized by its characters, with which they interact, to which they surrender and that they use as a guide for action. Within the analytical framework of " sciences studies ", pragmatic sociology and micro-history, this study presents a unique account of a social moment, considered in its historical individuality