La liberté de circuler. Tout est dans le titre

Abstract

As a preamble to this special issue dedicated to the driving licence, this paper proposes a twofold investigation. On one hand, it tries to put the driving licence in perspective by locating it within the general landscape of the regulations of movements of people in contemporary France. To do it, a distinction is made between what is considered as the main devices by which the institutional framing of travels and journeys operates today: codifications of traffics, authorizations to circulate and certifications of technical equipment. On the other hand, the paper deepens the analysis of the licence as an institutionalized device by examining the various generic configurations or situations which it engenders. This approach brings us to conceptualize the driving licence as a piece of a wider “institutional canvas” whose social peculiarity is to lubricate the movements of people endorsing and corresponding to the standards which it establishes and to impede those of people which cannot comply to them. Numerous examples are exposed throughout the article to illustrate the development of the analysis.