| Abstract: | The article discusses the meanings of youth culture, and particularly music, in contemporary France, in the light of the Ministry of Culture's adoption a quarter of a century ago of a sympathetic discourse towards it. Contrasting similarly sympathetic French sociological analyses with the seminal work undertaken in Anglophone cultural studies on subcultures, it argues that the variable nomenclature of youth culture in French public discourse is founded on two fundamental ways of conceptualising youth culture, to which the work of Pierre Mayol draws attention. While la culture des jeunes, denoting the leisure practices of 15- to 24-year-olds, connotes a culture existing in an ephemeral, ghettoised present, la culture jeune has undergone the process that Bourdieu calls legitimation. The article concludes by asking whether these dual meanings of youth culture may ultimately be mapped on to the republican opposition between particularism and universalism. |
