L'Enracinement social de la mortalité routière

Abstract

There are no official statistics in France establishing a correlation between road fatalities and social origins, while this correlation is demonstrably objective. The remarkable absence of data about the occupation of victims of road accidents contributes to giving credit to the commonplace idea that getting injured or dying in a road accident is only related to the haphazard nature of individual mobility and that with the exception of young men, we are all equal in terms of road mortality. Yet, road mortality does not occur randomly. Working class drivers are overrepresented among those who die on the road while drivers from the upper middle class are underrepresented. And while the poorest die on the road amidst collective indifference, the social fact of road mortality is not viewed as a social problem. Rather it is made visible only as an issue emptied from its social content and viewed through the prism of the driver's individual responsibility.