La franc-maçonnerie, observatoire des trajectoires et des dynamiques sociales au 18e siècle

Lodges and the area of freemasonry constituted a real laboratory in which brothers tested the plasticity and resistance of Ancien Régime societies, explored their interstices to grant themselves spaces in which to meet freely outside the field of standard sociability, academies and pious fraternities, but without cutting ties with such groups. For the historian of Masonic sociability this offers a privileged observatory for social codes, qualification or disqualification processes, individual and collective trajectories, such as personal texts or ego-documents allow one to recreate them.Beaurepaire Pierre-Yves. La franc-maçonnerie, observatoire des trajectoires et des dynamiques sociales au 18e siècle. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°37, 2005. Politiques et cultures des Lumières. pp. 17-30