Contenu du sommaire : Les engagements du 20e siècle

The People's Cause, Michelle Perrot. The idea of direct intervention, which goes back to Early Modem times and thrived during the Enlightenment, is at the root of political commitment. It remained, however, restricted in scope and more attentive to he rights of Man than to social concerns. In the course of the nineteenth-century, by contrast, the social question came to the fore as writers tended to eulogize the People. But the autonomy of the workers movement, readily anti-intellectual, confined nineteenth-century writers to the secondary role of "road companions", which in turn freed them for the task of upholding justice, as in the Dreyfus Affair. All these mutations, of causes, actors, projects and behaviors, outlined complex configurations reflecting changes in attitudes to time, to space and to ways of envisioning the future. Nineteenth-century experiences help us to better understand the various forms, both fleeting and vigorous, of contemporary commitents.

Change the Century, Antoine Prost. Unlike specific commitments born out of a particular cause to defend, the 20th century saw the emergence of commitment in the singular. This engagement characterized a relationship to the world and history in progress, a way of defining the human condition by its historicity.Thus committed writers, a literature and a cinema came into being. This com- mitment for which existentialism provided the theoretical underpinning at the Liberation and that culminated with the Communist Party's engagement was gradually worked out during the period between the two wars, by the intellectuals attracted by the Communist Party requiring from them a disciplined and global membership, but also by Catholic action movements and personalism whose role should be stressed. It was dissolved in the last third of the century with the rise of contemporary individualism and the denunciation of power at work in any militant organization.

Trade Unionism, a Limited Horizon ?, Joël Michel. There is a gap that can't easily be reduced between intellectual engagement and trade union militantism. Commitment is an individual act taken in the name of a uniserval morality whereas trade union militantism is a collective act whose aim is to defend oneself and those like oneself. The former seeks the greatest immediate visibility whereas the latter's action exists in the long term and accepts the humility of the daily management of social relations. That the notion of commitment spread to social militantism was thanks to the political commitment model put into practice by the French Communist Party and the CGT after W.W.II. The accounts of militants' lives clarify the collective motivations of social commitment and highlight its spe- cificity. Today, however, the decline of the major unions and the wearing out of the traditional forms of worker militantism link the latter with the individual engagement of intellectuals.

The Party and self-sacrifice, Marc Lazar. Engagement or commitment means not so much belonging to the Communist Party as a process whose end product is becoming communist. To understand this it's necessary to take into account the conception of the party, the constraints the French Communist Party decreed for its militants, and the type of activities and behavior demanded of them. Nevertheless, this ideal commitment pattern must not hide the varied forms of communist engagement. While the general meaning can be thought of as a special form of religion, it is true that it is going through decisive changes today.

The Four Seasons of Intellectuals, Jean-François Sirinelli. The commitment of intellectuals since the Dreyfus affair constitutes a national tradition, this key moment forming the "birth" of a type of involvement sowed during thanks to Voltaire and the 18th century. During the period between the two wars, intellectuals played a major role because of the seriousness of the stakes as well as because of the very nature of a clash that, opposing Nazism and Communism, directly called to the intellectuals. After the Liberation and the Algerian war, however, these engagements diminished as media coverage tended to abolish the power of intellectuals.

Seeking Commitment (1940-1944), Olivier Wieviorka. In spite of preconceived ideas, engagements during the black years remained the exception. The explanation of danger is not sufficient : collaboration did not mobilize more massively than the Resistance. At least the Resistance induced a new form of engagement, that reconciled, in the name of a group condemned to passivity, an ethic of conviction and one of responsability. The Resistance was a minority effort to restore the general interest during a period of withdrawal towards the private sphere. It defines a libertarian type of engagement whose model continued to wield a strong attraction even up to the 1968 generation, but whose nature also helps to explain the political failure after the Liberation.

Protesters and Companions : The Patterns of Gaullist Involvement, Bernard Lachaise. Since Free France, commitment to Gaullism means a total and personal belonging, a devotion to the exaltation of the figure of General de Gaulle. But from the adventure of the RPF up to post-de Gaulle Gaullism, Bernard Lachaise shows that the motivations as well as the forms of engagement in Gaullism have varied over time. Companionship was a strong and simple image, but it covers divergences and conflicts as well.

The Downside of the European Adventure, Robert Frank. In studying the various types of commitment to Europe from the 1920s today, Robert Frank retraces a complex history with its golden ages and its crises. Many personalities, circles and elites have partipated in this involvement, from Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi to Jean Monnet, from Aristide Briand to Jacques Delors, from Paul Valéry to Edgard Morin. But this history turns is back on that of the construction of Europe. The fact that the European Union is suffering from a lack of image today is probably the resuit of the gap between the two histories.

Markers for a History of «Non-Engagement», Christophe Prochasson. Is non-engagement the exact opposite of engagement ? Is it even a useful word for the historian ? Taking the examples of experts and intellectuals since the time of the Dreyfus affair, Christophe Prochasson wonders. Professional, moral and political justifications for this abstention that has had a had press for a long time can be distinguished within a wide range of behavior patterns.

Renewals in Political Action, Pascal Perrineau. Conventional wisdom by the French themselves and even more foreigners think of political commitment in France as militantism on the model of its golden age in the 1950s and 1960s. But these representations are far from the realities covered by the word "engagement". It thus seemed necessary to review these old forms, to assess their durability and to detect the signs of a renewal. The most important seems to be the unsatisfied social demand for a "post-policy." The present crisis of political participation might be born from the difficulty of the political system to respond to citizens' new demands more than a subtle and deep depolitization of the social body.

Thoughts on Personal Engagement, Paul-Louis Landsberg. This text is the first part of an article published by the journal Esprit in November 1937. A reflection on historicity, Paul-Louis Landsberg's analysis, haunted by spain, is rather close to what Malraux said at the same time in Esprit. His richer argumentation, however, was extended by an "introduction to a critique of the myth", also published in Esprit, in January, 1938.