L’anthropologie historique spatialisée d’Alain Dewerpe

Alain Dewerpe’s spatialised historical anthropology. During the almost forty years he devoted to the historian’s profession, Alain Dewerpe remained loyal to two major precocupations beyond the other central questions and objects that marked his research. We could even see them as his trademarks : the anthropological approach and the spatial approach to historical phenomena. Both were present from the Tour de France royal, co-authored with Jean Boutier and Daniel Nordman (1984), to the book he was working on when he died, on the workers of Ansaldo from the middle of the19th century to the 1930s (2017). These two closely entwined requirements gave birth to a work in which Dewerpe advanced a series of proposals, two of which are examined here : the protoindustrial proposal, tested in the frame of the genesis of the Italian industrial triangle in the years 1780-1914 ; the factory proposal, outlined with his study of the workers of the factory of Oberkampf in the second half of the 18th century and developed subsequently in his History of Work in France (1989) and the experience of the « big Genoese factory ».