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Collective emotions, collective mindset, very contemporary, double-thought, non-consent: All these concepts developed by Pierre Laborie are an attempt to explain the social complexity of reality and to describe the epistemological singularity of the history of the period 1939-1945. These concepts are frequently referenced in Laborie's unique scholarly works that constantly shift back and forth between the analysis of a clearly defined object or area (the Lot département of south-west France in the 1930s and 1940s, the opinion and behaviour of groups, the Résistance, the stakes of memory) and a methodological reflection on how to write history. Among the concepts used, Laborie's oxymoron sauve-mémoire et trouble-mémoire (preserve or ‘save' memory, and disrupt or ‘forget' memory), which this paper explores in detail. This odd, apparently contradictory concept refers to the historian's ethical approach, faced with uses of the past that are increasingly far removed from direct knowledge. While trouble refers to critical knowledge, sauve has multiple meanings that help shed light on the concept.

This paper presents two ways of reading Pierre Laborie's words. Firstly, by analysing their essential functions in his specific way of writing history. Then, by proposing a selection of definitions of words drawn from Pierre Laborie's texts. For Laborie, as an historian of the social imagination, words are crucial because opinion phenomena—the focus of his scholarship—resist straightforward interpretation. More than other approaches, Laborie's approach must ‘make words speak, rather than speaking about words'. If we add that, in light of his personal history, words help to ‘postpone the burial by death', we understand that they play a crucial role in his œuvre as advocates for the unfamiliar (Carlo Ginzburg). This is because, for Pierre Laborie, words act as screens for temporalities, i.e., they allow us to restore the sequence of time in the events of the societies being studied, including the future tense as seen from the past. As such, words are ‘a story of their own'.

During the Nazi Occupation of France, the underground press asserted its mission as ‘giving words and things back their identity' (Combat, December 1942). A corpus of 169 clandestine tracts and underground newspapers disseminated through Franche-Comté between 1940 and 1944, while borrowing from the major national press, focused more directly on the relations between the Résistance and the population. Lexicological techniques reveal the words each group used to identify itself: Résistance for tracts and newspapers of the non-communist Movements (Combat, MUR, Libération-Nord, Lorraine, Défense de la France), France for the publications of communist-linked movements (PCF, Front national, CGT, various committees, etc.), which almost never used the term Résistance. Similarly, in referring to their readers: the Movements addressed the population as a whole, whereas the Communists spoke to very specific categories (women, young workers, farmers, etc.). The underground tracts did not have the same purpose: those of the Movements aimed to inform the population, whereas those of the Communists want to mobilise it. An analysis of these publications reveals different cultures and strategies—either proclaimed or concealed—that changed over time.

While cinema was not the main topic of Pierre Laborie's research, it nevertheless held an important and unique place in his scholarship, his career and his conception of history. Apart from his long-standing interest in Marcel Ophuls' Le chagrin et la pitié (‘The Sorrow and the Pity'), he chose very early on to include films in his research universe, during a period when this approach was very unusual. Motivated by his desire to explore social complexity, he thus found cinema to contain an outstanding reservoir of concentrated representations. Fascinated by the process of producing animated pictures, he was a historical advisor for several productions, and this role prompted him to think about the gap between history and cinematic writing. Thus, cinema became his ally in his tireless endeavour to refocus on the stakes of writing history.

While the Conservatoire du Littoral, whose aim is conservation of the French shoreline, is an emblematic organisation of the ‘environmental turn' of public policies in the 1970s, behind its creation are the stakeholders who promoted the expansion of mass tourism during the ‘Trente Glorieuses' in France. In the early 1970s, regional planners and tourism and leisure business leaders assumed that heavy development of the shoreline eroded its attractiveness. The Conservatoire du Littoral became a way to correct the ecological consequences of increasing anthropic pressure, by combining environmental protection and economic promotion of coastal areas. The gradual ‘greening' of the organisation was undertaken by civil servants who incorporated environmental concerns into public policies that had been forged for territorial planning purposes. Based on unpublished archives, this paper retraces the trajectory of this organisation from its conception in 1972 to its consolidation in 1978.

The attitude of most global business towards environmental issues changed around 1990. The article argues that these changes were new in two ways. Global corporations, through business organisations such as the International Chamber of Commerce, chose to position themselves at the heart of environmental defence. But they also sought to reject government-led forms of management and to promote the autonomy of partners engaging freely in contracts. This paper first details the way business organisations strategically organised this shift. It then considers how environmental management, environmental audits and environmental marketing took shape. It closes with reflections on the form of hegemony this solution represents, and the alternative forms that appeared in parallel, notably in the United States, through the denial of climate change.

The best-known secondary student movements in May and June 1968 are those that took place in Paris. This paper focuses on these movements from the perspective of high school students in Lyon, encompassing the broadest possible scope of schooling (long-cycle or short-cycle vocational training, general secondary schools, and single-sex or coed schools). The archives enable us to present a panorama of these students' participation in movements, in terms of the timeline, the number of schools affected and the kinds of events. Then, we focus on the daily events over these two months. This close-up perspective lets us assess what ‘mobilisation' or ‘activism' meant for students who were under strict social supervision. Lastly, by looking at the post-May world through their eyes, we can see why certain students felt that they had won a victory, even though this two-month period is often seen as having had a minor impact on secondary education.