“She said: we are conscientious workers … We must make do with what we have … It’s not so bad compared to what it once was … We had a quiet life … We earned our bread honestly …”. As a kind of homecoming, Philippe Gaboriau traces the life of his aunt, a shoe worker in the Choletese between the 1960s and 2000s. He invites us to hear the authentic words of Mireille, with their regional and generational particularities. Through the memories of this woman and the comments of the narrator, we see a destiny with its joys and tragedies. This story plunges us into the small everyday gestures, values and cultural references of a generation of workers born in the 1920s and 1930s.
Philippe Gaboriau was born in 1952. He is a sociologist at the CNRS and an honorary member of the Centre Norbert Elias.