Henri Peretz Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

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Oral History

In your work as a sociologist today, one of your focuses and one of the things that you teach is oral history. What got you interested in capturing the lives of people as a way to do sociology?

My feeling was that most famous French sociologists like Touraine, Bourdieu, and the father, Durkheim, were very abstract. I very often saw that they ignored history. They ignored the individual. That pushed me to try to collect myself, in my Ph.D. and in my first research. I think that everybody has something to say, and I think the construction of a life is a major object of sociology. All those theories are always one-sided, you see. Also, to be honest, I like the contact with people. I think that one of the main things of being a sociologist is to have a relation with people, not to stay at your desk and read only books from the library. So, this relation taught me a lot. I learned about people from other conditions. I was upper middle class, and I visited peasants, teachers from the secondary class, working class people, and this gave me a lot if insight into the condition of French people, especially when this country started changing a lot in the late sixties.

The kinds of changes, among others, that you're talking about include the inflow of immigrants which changed the topography of France.

No, I would not say this. France, and a lot of people ignore this, was always, like the United States, a country of immigration, since the Italians came to Paris in the fifteenth century. So, the thing that changed, and everybody agrees on this, is that the generation of immigrants until the 1970s would hide their origin. They would go to the French school, not have their own institutions, except a few Italian institutions, some churches, but they would try to, what we say, integrate into the country. One of the main features is that at that time they were mainly single men. If you are a single man, you don't create your own life, your own family. You adopt the rules of the country.

Things have changed absolutely. It's a very strange historical problem. When the crises came, the French government at the time, President Giscard d'Estaing, decided that we are going to stop the immigration, but we open the door to the family. So the family came. We call this regroupement familial, collecting families. This has absolutely changed the landscape of France. Of course, people came from other countries. Maybe I'm too focused on this, but I think it is very important: when you have the women. The women resist more than man, in the beginning, our local rules. They create the family, you see, the division of labor, the kids, and this is a major effect of immigration since the sixties. So now, we have this effect of the second of four generations.

Let me understand what you are saying. You are saying, in a way, that once the families came over, the women resisted, that is, the mother in the family would resist the integration into French society and French rules, trying to maintain the integrity of the culture that they brought.

It started like this, but we can't generalize, because if we think about some people coming from Maghreb, very quickly on the opposite, some women start being clothed like every French woman, going out without any rules. But I think this creation of the family was the beginning of resistance to the French culture.

Let's go back to oral history. You've given us a sense of where it fits in the struggle with pure theory. What is the key to successfully extracting a person's story? How does one best set up an interview to talk with someone and get them to tell the story of their life?

I think the first rule is to have people understand that nobody is stupid. Everybody has something to say, and you have to be dedicated to the people. There is a climate of trust, and it starts very quickly. Some people are unable to do that. If you are shy, it's finished. People may be shy; you're not allowed, as an interviewer, to be shy. For most or many people, not all of them, maybe this is the first time in their life where people speak with them and ask them their story. This is something unbelievable. It's very emotional for them. In many, many cases, when I collect the life history, or my students [do], this is the first reaction we see. People say, "I have nothing to say," and they start, and at the end say, "How could I say all this?" And they like this. It is a kind of pleasure, you see.

Is it good to have a sense of where you want to go, or are these interviews free-flowing? Does sociology give you the tools to guide them so that people reveal themselves to you and to themselves?

Yes, but you have to find a balance between your general scheme of life history, like where were you born, did you go to high school -- what you did with me -- but also when somebody is taking a track, it's very special. You have to be very attentive. It's the reason I want students to use tape recorders. You don't care about taking notes. If somebody is taking a secret track, you have to follow him and try to understand, and in the meantime you listen to them, you have to interpret and be able to ask more questions. It's a question of balance. It's very difficult, because sometimes it's a dead end. You say: that's a very special problem, but not interesting at all. So, I would say this faculty of adapting yourself is one of the major things. One famous American sociologist says "tact and tactics."

Very good. Now, you have actually integrated these ideas of interviewing into courses that you offer at the university. Tell us a little about that and the way you make this insight into interviewing into a structure for training sociologists for the kind of fieldwork that they have to do.

We can give this class for graduate or undergraduate, it doesn't matter, it's the same thing. You have to attract them, and one of the best things to attract them is to have them listen to former interviews made by students. Anonymous, but by students. Not by the teacher. They listen to the tapes and they are amazed because they see that everybody has something to say. And slowly, they recognize facts, they recognize careers, they recognize events, and it's really very good training for them. They see that students like them are able to collect. One of the things I say, I give you the grade, but maybe I should give it to the person you interviewed, because she was a good person. Sometimes, the people are so good that with two or one question, they speak forever.

I guess that it's important to teach the students, as you said, tact and tactics, to actually listen and go places which their plan had not anticipated ...

Yes, for instance, difficult issues, like money. People don't want to speak about their salary or even modified employment. Very crucial issues, so you have to be very cautious. But you have to know, because it's very important. Their life, their sexual life, you don't ask very precise questions. But, for instance, I'll give you an example. One major experience I've had of my life as interviewer was when I interviewed Catholic upper-class women who went to a very, very prestigious private school. We talked a long time about the school, but at a certain point I saw that most of the women had a very high rate of fertility, many children. I did not know how to ask them how they did. And one of them told me, "I used to let nature do." And so, I had a question for the next time: "Did you let nature do?" So, I think you can collect [from] the people themselves, the language. Because you have your framework, your questionnaire, but you don't have the words used by people. The more you interview people, the more you are able to talk and ask questions in their own language. That's very important, because we don't all have the same language. That's the reason why I told you the second part of the class is to study the language of the people.

And by language you don't mean just French or Italian, but you mean within the language of French, for example, the different words that different classes of people might use.

A long time ago, we interviewed former peasants. The way they chose to speak about their money was only the number of horses they had. For the students it was amazing.

So by knowing the number of horses you could then get what the income might be.

Talking about money -- now we have three configurations of money. You have the old franc, the francs and euros. So, it's going to change absolutely the way you collect data now.

What about background in social history? You do that also with your students?

Yes, because even French students -- I used to teach in the United States, it was the same thing -- they are not very strong in history. So you start by giving them some kind of overview of the social history of the country since the beginning of the twentieth century. You do this by many means. First you look at statistics, because you have the birth rate, I insist very much on birth rate. I take always the example of the consequences of the First World War. Almost two million people died in France in the First World War and it changed completely the demography of France. A lot of people died, a lot of people could not marry, a lot of children were not born. So you do this very precisely, to give them a way to think about the consequences of a major event. You describe the event, the First World War, for instance, and then you see the consequences in statistics. So you give them a bit to think about the relation between an event and the consequences. The wars are among the best events. And also, for instance, an economic crisis or things like that. It takes a third of the semester to get at this. One more thing I do, also, I give them to see some videotapes, especially of this woman, [Yasmina] Bengigi, who made several movies, marvelous movies on the immigration. It's had a very special effect. The shy students, I would say -- some girls from Maghreb background are very shy, they don't want to cover their family. And sometimes they change their mind by seeing that it's possible to interview. I recommend this movie.

And the name of this movie is ... ?

Memoires d'immigrés, Memories of Immigrants, by a woman called Bengigi. Very nice.

Next page: Immigration and France