Le poste et le lieu : enjeux professionnels et familiaux de la mobilité dans le corps de la magistrature en France

Careers as judges or prosecutors are commonly thought to be marked by a high degree of geographic and functional mobility. The purpose of this article is to examine this mobility by showing how it structures the group and its organisation while at the same time, and quite paradoxically with the role attributed to it, being relatively contained. Based on a statistical treatment of data from the Annuaire de la magistrature and on a corpus of interviews, this article confirms the extent to which the representations of hyper-mobility are significant, whether they emanate from the governing bodies of the profession or from the magistrates themselves. It goes on to establish that both types of mobility are at the same time rather moderate and highly gendered, insofar as men are much more mobile than women. Finally, it emphasizes the trade-offs made by individuals, trade-offs that determine the construction of differentiated careers according to the choice of positions, the symbolic value of which is variable. In this context, gender plays a predominant role, in particular because it constrains the articulation between professional ambition and domestic life in different ways. JEL: J16, J61, J62, M51