My PhD work aimed to assess intergenerational transmission and life-course change of attitudes towards authority. Intergenerational transmission is hypothesised as the mechanism through which parents' authoritarian attitudes affect their children's attitudes towards authority in adulthood. In the assessment of this transmission mechanism, this analysis accounts for individual-level theoretically relevant factors such as gender, education, social class, offspring's cognitive ability in childhood, as well as family background, in a longitudinal, single-cohort perspective. The research used the British Cohort Study 1970 (BCS70), which allows for the analysis of change at both the intra- and inter-individual levels. The sweeps analysed are those in years 1975 for the parents, and 1980, 1996, 2000 and 2012 for the cohort members. The analytical chapters of the thesis are made of three papers: The first assessed change (or stability) in attitudes to authority in the BCS70 from 1996 to 2012; the second looked at how parental authoritarian worldviews affect their children's attitudes towards authority when the children are adults; finally, the third paper aimed to evaluate the effect of parental attitudes on cohort members' attitudes towards authority in adulthood, after controlling for the latter's cognitive ability in childhood. I found that attitudes had a reasonably high level of stability across the life course. Despite moderately strong correlations across attitudes within waves, the different attitudes showed different patterns of longitudinal evolution, suggesting different causal influences. The evidence for direct transmission of attitudes from parents to children was surprisingly weak; the social statuses of the parents and cohort members, and especially the members' childhood cognitive ability, were the strongest predictors of authoritarian attitudes in adulthood.

Cette recherche se propose d'examiner, grâce aux outils et aux méthodes de l'anthropologie de la parole et de l'analyse discursive des récits de vie, la transmission des silences et des non-dits au sein de familles dont un membre est issu de la migration de la Bulgarie communiste. À partir d'un ensemble de récits de vie qui se composent de conversations avec les membres de douze familles dans lesquelles un des parents a émigré en France avant 1989, et d'une observation participante de trois années dans une classe de licence de bulgare à l'Inalco, les analyses s'organisent autour de trois axes de réflexion : les liens entre l'histoire socio-politique traversée et les histoires particulières vécues ; ceux entre la transmission et la réception d'une parole marquée par le silence ; ceux entre l'intégration d'un héritage oral et silencieux et l'extériorisation d'une performativité singulière. Outre les histoires familiales, des silences et des non-dits sont transmis par une génération élevée dans la censure et l'autocensure du régime totalitaire. Ce père ou cette mère ayant grandi dans un silence forcé, renvoie à ses enfants, à travers les récits de vie, bien plus que des mots et des paroles. Dans la première partie, une contextualisation historique de l'étude retrace la stratégie du silence dans l'idéologie communiste comme étant à l'origine de la difficulté à inscrire une histoire individuelle dans la grande Histoire. La seconde partie fait état de l'impact de l'expérience subjective du communisme bulgare sur le vécu du silence des parents dans leurs énonciations. Dans la troisième partie, l'étude se concentre sur les effets de ce silence parental sur la seconde génération qui perçoit des failles et des dissimulations dans les histoires reproduites elles-mêmes comme une épopée mythique familiale. Ce constat amène à la dernière partie qui démontre que pour répondre à ce silence, certains enfants vont agir dans leurs discours mais aussi au-delà de la parole, dans leur vie quotidienne. Certains tentent ainsi de performer ces silences pour transformer, par l'art et la création notamment, le poids d'un héritage oral et silencieux en richesse personnelle. Ce travail a pour but d'éclairer la façon dont les événements historiques vécus subjectivement conditionnent les récits de vie familiaux mais plus encore déterminent bien des manières de faire et de dire des enfants, constituant une seconde génération du silence qui n'a rien à perdre à le mettre en mots, et même à le crier haut et fort. / Using the tools and methods of anthropology of speech and discursive analysis of life stories, this research aims to examine the transmission of silences and the unspoken (non-dit) within families in which a member migrated from Communist Bulgaria. Based on several life stories stemming from conversations with members of twelve families in which one parent emigrated to France before 1989, and on three years of participant observation in an undergraduate Bulgarian class at the National institute for oriental languages and civilizations (INALCO), analyses are carried out around three foci: the study of links between socio-political history as it is crossed by particular life stories; those between the transmission and the reception of discourses marked by silence; those between the integration of an oral and silent heritage and the acting out of singular performativity. Besides family history, silences and the unspoken are transmitted by a generation raised under censorship and self-censorship within that particular totalitarian regime. Through these life stories a father or a mother raised in a context of forced silence indeed sends back much more than just words and talk to their children. The first part of this study will be a historical contextualization tracing back a strategy of silence within the Communist ideology as the origin of the difficulty to inscribe individual stories in larger History. The second part demonstrates the impact of the subjective experience of Bulgarian communism on the apprehension of silence by the parents in their discourse/narrations. In the third part, the study focuses on the effects of parental silence on the second generation, who necessarily perceive cracks and concealment in stories reproduced as a mythical family saga. This observation opens to the final part that argues that to answer this silence, some children act through discourse, but also beyond speech, in their daily lives. Some thus try to perform these silences to transform, through art and creation in particular, the weight of an oral but silent heritage into personal resources. This thesis aims to shed light on the way subjectively experienced historical events condition family life stories or even how they determine the way children do things and say things, thereby constituting a second generation that has nothing to lose in talking about this silence, or even to shout it loud and clear.