« Nous, maintenant, on veut poursuivre cette occupation de la rue » : les catholiques attestataires entre contre-culture, mission et défense patrimoniale

Abstract

The debate about the same sex marriage bill in France has launched a significant sequence of politicization and assertion in the streets for the conservative Catholics. Though mobilization declined after the law was passed, these initiatives still arouse differentiated appropriation of public urban space. Relying on ethnographic work, this article analyses two logics of action emerging complementarily and organizing these post-‘Mariage pour tous’ demonstrations in Paris. In both cases there is a real ‘place-taking/place-making’ at work. Extending the study of recent Catholic mobilizations to the different activists still active after ‘La Manif Pour Tous’ makes it possible to understand how central the issue of drop in status seems in order to analyze these protest repertoires and their evolutionary inscription in the city, especially in the direction of the ‘peripheries’.