La frontière (le voisin) et l'étranger. Les enjeux identitaires d'un conflit frontalier

Abstract

The border populations, especially in the Pyrenees, maintained complex relationships with one another as well as with state power. It was a mixture of proximity and trust, of distance and suspicion. That was particularly the case of the Spanish and French rural communities in the valley of Baïgorry, which had been very similar for centuries, but whose relations changed in the 19 th century with the nationalisation of French society. The old and ritualised, pastoral conflicts now opposed communities whose identities were increasingly different. Because of a global change in the perception of the border, their goals now transcended the local setting. These conflicts enable us to question this renewed presence of the nation on its fringes: was it something imposed by the central state despite local resistance or was it a more complex process which did not exclude a certain amount of identity manipulations from the involved populations?.