Contenu du sommaire

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial's French Justice Bernard and his Dissenting Judgment, Jean Esmein. Justice Röling of The Nederlands, who had been sitting in the judgment tribune close to Henri Bernard at the IMTFE, has said in his interviews, when The Tokyo Trial and Beyond was written, that thinking the Memorandum of Dissent of the Honourable Mr Justice Bernard over in the forty years after the trial, he had corne to esteem more and more his insight. Yet the french Indictment in Tokyo has not been much analysed until now, and the personality of the french representative at the IMTFE is still less known. This article tries to give an account of the action and afterthoughts of the french party.

Plots and Purges in the Algerian Liberation Army (1958-1961), Charles-Robert Ageron. Spy mania, fear of betrayal, and sectarianism were responsible for " revolutionary" purges within the National Liberation Army during the Algerian war of independence. This on-going purge often decimated the officers and demoralized the men. This is the first article to look scrupulously at the violent revenge taken, wilaya by wilaya. It was useful today, it seemed to us, to recall the existence of these victims, sacrificed on the "altar of human stupidity".

Joseph Barthélemy and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy, Gilles Martinez. Joseph Barthélemy was the advocate of individual liberties before becoming Justice Minister in the Vichy government between 1941 and 1943. Such an apparently contradictory itinerary is exemplary in the path of a certain number of French liberals. It shows that their ideology was incapable of adapting to crisis periods and that they were able to rally to authoritarian solutions.

1815-1945: Literary Forms of Defeat, Anne Simonin. In 1945, the partisans of the Vichy regime and of a collaboration policy with Nazi Germany suffered a radical military and ideological defeat. This situation made writers, compromised in various degrees with the occupier, adopt an original literary strategy. They would mobilize the history of France — in particular the Restoration and 1814 and 1815 - in an attempt to impose a historical interpretation of the present and deny the radical change produced by the events that occurred between 1940 and 1945. If it were possible to compare 1945 and 1815, it would mean that there were no traitors ; that the purge was only a vicissitude of the White Terror ; that today's collaborators are yesterday's outlaws, in other words they are the temporary losers. On the left, Aragon understood, uncovered and fought this historico-literary operation, the base of a culture of bad faith to which some intellectuals on the right chose to attach themselves.

Purges, Disengagements, Exclusions. Downsizing in the French Army (1940-1947), Claude d'Ahzac-Epezy. Whereas the status of military personnel guarantees them from arbitraiy exclusion, the 1940-1947 period was marked by a greater precarity in officers' careers, hit first by Vichy measures of exclusion and then by the purges of 1944-1945 and the disengagement of the officers of 1946-1947. The analysis of the different phases of the reduction of the force details the numeric scope of these reductions and shows the criteria of the dominant choices. There were more reductions in the professional elites than the political ones, but the arbitrariness of the procedures contributed to breaking the moral engagement that bound the officers to the State. The consequences were felt until the early 1960s.

Were the Post-War Socialist Conferences Democratic?, Anne-Laure Anizan. The French Socialist Party has always presented itself as the democratic party in France. Beyond the Party's rhetoric about itself, what was the reality of the relationship between the militant rank and file and the Parisian leaders? The SFIO Conferences, presented as the leading moments of the party's democratic life, showed that in the early 1950s, there was a division of labor: the leaders proposed and the base decided.

German Philately between Memory and Amnesia (1949-1989), Frédéric Rousseau. Postage stamps, so sought after by philatelists, are neglected by historians. What a mistake. Because in a long-term analysis, stamps are the witness of memorialist policies of each issuing country. The study of West German stamps for the period from the creation of West Germany to the fall of the wall, unveils a deeply Christian and Western German identity. Moreover, the basic question of the relationship of the people with their past can be seen. Unlike its eastern neighbor who fostered a socialist and antifascist memory, West Germany, seeking normality, chose a less militant, more consensual memory, at the price of a few memory lapses and a big repression of the Nazi past.

The Metamorphoses of Italian Communism since 1989, Lilly Marcou. In the world process of Communist party transformation following the collapse of the USSR, the Italian Communist Party occupies a special place. Its own history, especially since 1945, placed it at the forefront of a western communism that wanted to detach itself from the Soviet experience by forging its own path and its own model of society. The consequence of this long period from Togliatti to Berlinguer was the 1989 to 1991 transformation from a communist party into a respectable social-democratic party, member of the International Socialist and mainspring of the entry of Italy in the European unification process. Altough the majority of the old ICP took this turn, a minority created a new party, the PR. This party did not consider itself as a continuation of the old one but it stands for the birth of another communism, one that takes into account both the failure of the Leninist model and also of the reformist one. The future will tell which of these two parties, offspring of the International Communist matrix, took the right road.

Buren's "Columns". A Politico-Artistic Crisis, David Cascaro. Illustrating the renewed public commission policy for historical monuments in 1985, Daniel Buren's work, Les deux plateaux, in the Palais Royal's court of honor, rapidly became the archetype of official art. Built in a space concentrating powerful institutions (Conseil d'État, (State Council) Ministry of Culture, Conseil Constitutionnel (Constitutional Council)), right in the middle of the legislative electoral campaign, the work roused passions fomented by the record of five years of socialism. Interrupted by a legal question, would the work begun by the Cultural Minister, Jack Lang, be continued after the arrivai of his successor, François Léotard?

Anti-Americanism and the Gulf War, Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol. The Gulf War showed that a powerful anti-American current persisted in France in the 1990s in spite of the apparent seduction of the American model following the disappearance of De Gaulle and the Berlin wall. Latent among the French who sided the American led anti-Irakian camp, Americanophobia welded together the mixed bag of war opponents. Complaints such as the vassalization of the world, the thirst for gas, the confrontation of cultures, and media misinformation also expressed a profound worry about French identity itself.