Abstract
This article, resuming the issue of the JAC (Agricultural Catholic Youth) in France and the link between religious convictions and economic changes, deals this time with the building-up and evolution of the personality system. It brings to light three periods, distinguishing three different styles of generations of JAC militants, and focuses mainly on the second generation, i.e. that of 1945-61. For this period, the specific kind of generation is basically due to the fact that the JAC is the scene of a new transaction evolving between the rural society experiencing the rapid modernization of agriculture and the Church which would soon face the Vatican II Council. Thus, this article endeavours to describe how the religious mediation — both cultural and social — operated. Compared with the “non-jacists” and with the following period of the JAC, this generation appears to be most original, and this article is concerned with the evolution of the “jacists” of that period. Did the religious mediation keep on operating, and how?
Study of certain social “trajectories” reveals a divergent evolution encompassing: the reproduction mode of the “jacist” habitus, through their involvement in the CMR (Christians in the Rural World); the conversion and revival of religious reading through their contesting the prevailing economic and social development; and other religious involvements in addition to the imposition of secular logics.