“Gavroche Outside”: Street Capital(ism) and the Ethnobiography of a French Thug

This article presents the ethnobiography of a thug, thief, drug addict, and heroin dealer named Gavroche, who built up his “street capital” on the French punk and zonard scene. The text gives pride of place to Gavroche’s own words and as such is a firsthand document providing direct access to the meanings he gave to his own actions. Firmly grounded in these narratives of experience, the sociological interpretation that accompanies them examines the idea that the principles of capitalist entrepreneurship are reflected in criminal activities and shows that Gavroche’s life can be viewed as an existential paradigm of “street capitalism,” which reduces competitive relationships to their most violent and crude expression. In this article, ethnobiography therefore comes face-to-face with the “grand realities” of Capitalism, Entrepreneurship, Competition, and the Violence of the Marketplace but, as Clifford Geertz would put it, it “takes the capital letters off” these concepts, focusing instead on the intense details contained in the space of one life lived on the street and through illegal dealings