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This article studies poverty trends in France during the first two decades of the 2000s in the interest of extending the scope of poverty analysis beyond the issues of social disqualification and welfare assistance. Drawing on a nine-year longitudinal segment of Insee’s “Statistics on Resources and Living Conditions” survey (“Statistique sur les ressources et conditions de vie” or “SRCV”), 2004-2019, it shows the relevance–especially for France–of apprehending poverty in terms of trajectories, an analytic prism seldom used until now. Applying this approach enables us to show first that approximately 30% of the French population experienced at least one episode of monetary poverty in the nine years of survey tracking. This leads to identifying two major trajectory types: transitory poverty, marked by a brief period of monetary poverty, and chronic poverty, which is deeper and more persistent. The determinants of the two types differ as specified in the article: chronic poverty is more a matter of structural factors whereas transitory poverty has more to do with economic trends, particularly labor market trends. To show how poverty concerns widely different trajectories and profiles, to produce quantitative estimates, and to better understand the range of different experiences requires a dynamic approach.