This text is a socio-historical interpretation test to think of the evolution of violent behaviour in interpersonal relations since the 1970s since the French case. It is based on an original synthesis of different types of data available: police and judicial statistics, victimisation and self-revealed crime surveys, demographic and socio-economic data. The proposed model involves five processes that pass through French society: a process of pacification of customs, a politico-legal process of criminalisation, a process of judicialisation of conflicts in everyday social life, a socio-economic process of competition for consumer goods, and a process of economic and socio-spatial segregation. At the same time, this trial attempts to articulate many theoretical inputs that have made the history of sociology and criminology.