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Half a century after Roger Girod introduced the concept of “counter-mobility”, this article seeks to renew and empirically asses its relevance to sociology of social stratification. Drawing on Formation et Qualification Professionnelle surveys (FQP) (Training and Vocational Skills Survey) (Insee, 1970, 1993, 2003 and 2014-2015), the study confirms the persistence of the “counter-mobility” phenomenon in the French context. The data show that in 2015 nearly one in four socially mobile men and one in five socially mobile women, through their career mobility, actually return to their class of social origin, after having only temporarily moved away from it during their first job. Counter-mobile individuals, most of whom are less educated than individuals who never left their class of social origin and fewer of whom come from homogamous families, appear to have social characteristics that differentiate them from immobile individuals of the same social background. These findings suggest that we should analyze different paths and time frames of social reproduction in terms of the class fractions they define and the gender inequalities they exacerbate.