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Civic service is not only a political citizenship project offered to youth, but also a social laboratory for experimenting with new work activities. How can commitment work be characterized in this context? Based on the analysis of a large corpus of mission offers, this article focuses both on the ways to exhibit the work and the content of the activities associated with that work. The willingness to build an ideal society of solidarity is effectively reflected by a renewal of the formulations of work, but, under the guise of proliferation, the mission titles reveal that commitment is crystalized in a series of keywords or slogans. Moreover, behind the statement of these promises of change, the words that still reflect traditional labour standards persist.