Du menaçant à l’irrésistible. La gouvernementalité d’appariement dans le service public de l’emploi (1816-2016)

The invention of labour markets, where individuals move to sell their labour force, relies on gouvernemental-manufactured technical infrastructures that allow supply and demand to meet and (perhaps) contract. However, distinct devices have coexisted and followed each other for 200 years, carrying various political perspectives. Based on a socio-historical investigation, this article provides a chronology of public matching regimes in the French labour market. Once the initial reluctance in the beginning of the 19th century had been overcome, the State centralised matching devices during the First World War, then planned them after the Liberation, before developing market equipment to individualise the trajectories. The State has thus gradually become an economic actor but has used different categories to match supply and demand: gender and profession, then activity, qualification and production, before the current sequence based on competence, knowledge and mobility. Thus, the discourses on mobility, fluidity and individual responsibility need a growing and increasingly detailed State intervention to describe available jobs and workers.