Expériences du confinement de jeunes de quartiers populaires franciliens

How did young people in working-class neighborhoods cope with confinement? A collective survey carried out in various Île-de-France communes highlights the resources they mobilized to cope with the health crisis. The youth of working-class neighborhoods cover a diverse reality, in terms of age, gender, origin and religion (Kakpo 2006; Marlière 2011; Truong 2015). They nevertheless share a common experience of inequality, which the health crisis is helping to highlight once again. Here, we focus on the experience of the “first” confinement (March to May 2020) of young people living in these neighborhoods, who have been the subject of much media commentary but whose voices have been little heard. The aim of this article, based on twenty-eight interviews conducted with working-class young people aged 18 to 25 in various communities in the Paris region, is to show the extent to which these young people found themselves, in various configurations, among the first victims of the pandemic, and how they mobilized a range of resources to cope. Recourse to this notion of “resources” will enable us to “think about moments, relationships, actions, interactions that produce or engender aids, supports (thus analyzable in terms of resources) that do not exist outside the circumstances that produce them” (Faure and Thin 2019, p. 21) and to understand what enabled these young people to “stand their ground” and “pull through in spite of everything” (ibid.).