2

Two ethnographic surveys, one in a segregated social housing neighborhood, the other in an isolated rural village, are linked in order to explore the sociospatial variability of demobilization strategies targeting the working class in France today. A comparison of the conditions and outcome of two mobilizations reveals two highly polarized ways of controlling working-class populations, linked to public institutions’ varying degrees of remoteness: on the one hand, institutional close domination, where the demobilization work is divided between various public agents; on the other hand, political support given to relatively autonomous intermediaries from the local lower middle class. The conclusion suggests that, beyond sociospatial variability, governmental knowledge arising from familiarity with localized social relations increases the chances of successfully neutralizing mobilizations, by isolating the working classes.