Denouncing and Resisting. Identity Assignment Policies in France, 1970–2010

Abstract

In France, ever since the eighteenth century at least, state-controlled manufacturing of individual identities has grown through an accumulation of knowledge, know-how and practices that enabled the authorities to establish everyone’s identity with growing certainty and increase their influence on people’s personal life experience by collecting, shaping and exploiting growing amounts of individual data that made it possible to rearrange social reality by means of sorting and classification processes.¹ By defining unheard-of codes of identity and creating new obligations (administrative procedures, checks, controls, etc.) for those targeted, the identification tools implemented by the state thus gradually, but dramatically, altered many personal habits, behaviours and trajectories.² However, far from having been imposed upon amorphous, passive and helpless individuals, these instruments often seem to have stemmed from power struggle issues. Indeed, identity allocation processes have always been known to raise objections and trigger individual shunning or bypassing strategies, as well as more institutionalized forms of protest targeting the underlying logics of these efforts.³ Hence, these various manifestations of hostility, opposition and resistance should not be ignored, especially since they might directly impact the specific nature of established state identification schemes and the self-assigned objectives of implemented public policies.⁴