The article analyses the French case considering initially two different chronologies: a long term one which is rooted in the educational plans of the second half of the 18th century, linking educational equality with the construction of national unity and to the exercise of citizenship and, a more recent short-term chronology that corresponds to the project of the unitary school in which the question of social mobility is central. The theme of educational inequalities appears in France at the end of the 1950’s. However the second school explosion which starts in the 1980’s and the relative inefficiency of the alternatives tested in the educational system, amongst which decentralisation, demand a new formulation of the problem, taking into account the new situation created by unemployment and the increase in exclusion.
education sociology; inequalities in education