72

‪This paper sets out to survey existing research on the history of French students. Unlike teachers and managers, pupils - the main school stakeholders - have probably been least studied by historians. It has to be said that sources of student data are mostly indirect – often written by adults for adults – and incomplete, if they exist at all. As regards this student experience, which has gradually become a shared one, representations, literary accounts, and also autobiographies and memories, are very important. Although these sources are useful to the historian, to gain more meaning they need to be organised in series and compared with archival sources. We meet the same problem with the numerous images provided by photography or the cinema, while legal texts (laws, decrees, circulars) and textbooks show a prescribed student, shaped by adults. In the history of students, the statistical approach was initially dominant; it boosted our knowledge of all phenomena related to schooling and literacy, the massification and the level of democratisation, but it was also closely linked to the sociological trend that explained the construction of social and cultural inequalities. The student then became a unit of account in a statistical demonstration which sought to measure widespread phenomena. However, we can discern a wider range of methods from the 1990s onwards. Sociological and educational sciences research on the role of the pupil enable us to revisit the opinions of the students themselves. Historians stress the plurality of school experiences in different training sectors and institutions, and analyse the history of students through the prism of gender. At this level, it is important to compile a detailed inventory of private writing and students’ work. However, it would also seem relevant to look at sources which enable us to trace students’ careers, looking at both their social origins and the various ways in which families use networks of educational institutions in a given geographical area.