Daniel Bertaux

Daniel Bertaux (born 27 February 1939) is a French sociologist (Ecole des hautes etudes des sciences sociales, Centre d'etude des mouvements sociales CEMS) who is best known of initiating a research approach to use and study biographies in sociology. A second important field of study has been social mobility from which he moved into life histories as a "better" approach to study the personal destinies of people. He has also been active in the International Sociological Association, European Sociological Association and French Sociological Association (as founder and president). His perhaps most original study has been that of French bakers in the seventies (1980), conducted jointly with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame. The extensive manuscript has not been published but it is available online (see below). Before that, he wrote a manuscript on the life history method (1976), which has not been published but has been available in libraries. The best known book of his is an edited volume Biography and Society (1981) based mainly on texts presented in the World Congress of Sociology in Uppsala 1978, which can be said to have sounded the (re)start of the life history movement in sociology. This was not restricted to Europe but had a strong echo in Latin America, Canada and the US, where Bertaux also taught for extended periods. Later, with the crash of the Soviet Union, also Russia became an object of study, where Bertaux was both instrumental in collecting life stories and analyzing them (see Bertaux-Thompson-Rotkirch 2004)

The life history method has been previously known as part of the Chicago School and Polish Sociology, but it had largely fallen into disrepute in sociology (anthropologists continued doing individual case studies) until Oscar Lewis popularized the use of life stories in his Children of Sanchez. Inspired by Lewis, Bertaux started collecting the stories of French family bakers, as a mysteriously resilient occupation which had largely disappeared from other European countries. His main innovation was to combine the stories with insights of the social context, with showing how the different life stories of bakers, bakers' apprentices and their women were interconnected (for example:a baker could not set up shop by himself, he needed a wife. No wife, no shop). On the other hand, Bertaux emphasized life stories as stories of agency where the activities were part of the social whole. To top it off, he is an excellent story teller whose texts are filled with fantastic and unbelievable stories.

A third research interest has been poverty and precarity, which Bertaux studied from a comparative European perspective, later connected to a special interest in the Scandinavian Welfare Model, which Bertaux sees as having many advantages to the central European one. He has recently been rewarded for his activities by being accorded a doctor honoris causa in the University of Växjö, Sweden. He has been appointed an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland in 1995.

Originally educated as an engineer, and working shortly in military engineering, Bertaux has been associated with three of the big names in French sociology: Raymond Boudon, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine. In the French university system, this kind of career is a very problematic one, as one is supposed to be loyal, and then create one's own shop (just as in the bakers' trade). Perhaps therefore Bertaux has not achieved the position in French sociology he deserves, and he is probably better known or appreciated abroad.
He is married and publishes together with Catherine Delcroix (Marc Bloch Strasbourg2). He has two daughters and one son, and six grandchildren. His father was a well-known Germanist Pierre Bertaux who died in 1986.

Important publications

Social mobility

• Destins personnels et structure de classe (Individual destinies and class structure), Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1977
• La mobilité sociale (Social mobility), Hatier, coll. « Profil société », Paris, 1985
• (ed, with Paul Thompson): Pathways To Social Class. A Qualitative Approach To Social Mobility. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1997. 323 p.

Bakers' life stories

• (with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame): Une enquête sur la boulangerie artisanale en France Vol 1 (A study on artisanal bakery in France Vol I) (Vol 2).
  CORDES, 1980, offset, 2 vol.: vol 1, 401 p.; vol. 2, 124 p.
• (with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame): "Artisanal Bakery in France. How It Lives and Why It Survives", pp. 155-81 in Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott (Eds), The Petite Bourgeoisie. Comparative Studies of the Uneasy Stratum, London, MacMillan, 1981
• (with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame): "Life Stories in the Baker's trade", pp. 169-189 in D. Bertaux (Ed): Biography and Society, London and Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Londres, 1981; 2nd ed., California Press 1983
• "The Life-Cycle Approach as a Challenge to the Social Sciences", pp. 125-150 in Tamara K. Hareven and Kate J. Adams (Eds): Aging and Life Course Transitions. An Interdisciplinary Perspective. New York, The Guilford Press, 1982.
• "Stories as Clues to Sociological Understanding", pp. 93-108 in Paul Thompson (Ed): Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe, Pluto Press, London 1982

Other studies using life stories

• Histoires de vies - ou récits de pratiques ? Méthodologie de l'approche biographique en sociologie (Life stories - Methodology of the biographical approach in sociology). CORDES, 1976, ronéo, 235 p., bibl.
• (ed) Biography And Society. The Life-History Approach In The Social Sciences, Sage, London and Beverly Hills, 1981, 309 p.
• (with Catherine Delcroix) Des pères face au divorce : la fragilisation du lien paternel (Fathers in divorce: the weakening of the paternal relationship), CNAF, coll. « Espaces et Familles », Paris, 1991
• (ed with Paul Thompson: Between Generations. Family Models, Myths And Memories. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993; 210 p.
• (with Victoria Semyonova and Yekaterina Foteyeva (in Russian): Sudby lyudei: Russia XX Vek (Russian destinies in the 20th century), Moscow, 1996
• Les récits de vie. Perspective ethnosociologique (Life stories, an ethnosociological perspective), Nathan, coll. « 128 », Paris, 1997
• (with Véronique Garros): Lioudmilla. Une Russe dans le siècle (Lyudmila, a Russian of the century), La Dispute, coll. « Instants », Paris, 1998
• (ed, with Paul Thompson and Anna Rotkirch): On Living in Soviet Russia. Routledge, London 2004. 277 p.

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Name	Bertaux, Daniel
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Date of birth	27 February 1939
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