La construction sociale de l'éthos héroïque des alpinistes britanniques.: Analyse sociogénétique et dispositionnaliste.

International audienceMountaineering is a sport which really took off in England during the second half of the 19th century, during the well-named "Golden Age" of British mountaineering (1854-1865). This article is an attempt to point out a system of "social dispositions" - schemes of perception, thinking, action, and more generally, proclivities, tendencies, habits that are incorporated and the result of past social experiences - that appear repeatedly in a corpus of 44 mountaineers' narratives and autobiographies, and that can be characterized as a proper "ethos", shared and transmitted by British mountaineers from the 19th century onwards. Before that, a socio-historical analysis of the beginnings of British mountaineering allows to contextualise and to understand the roots of this ethos, answering the question of how specific ways of defining and practising mountaineering have been shaped by particular historical conditions. This point is illustrated by the portrait of Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), a famous mountaineer of the Golden Age