Sentiments, affects et émotions dans l’engagement à haut risque

This article aims to articulate emotional states, from the macro level (the passions) to the micro level (the moods), paying particular attention to primary groups that mediate the individual and society and therefore play a key-role in emotions and feelings. Two different high-risk activisms are investigated: Italian extreme left activists which radicalized to armed struggle in the 1970’s (from thirty interviews); French communist officers which participated to colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria as spies at the request of the communist party (from autobiographical narratives, three life-narratives and a biography of the one of them). A career analysis, based on an interactionist approach, allows us to link personal history, social groups, social structures and context