Contenu du sommaire : Varia

The Fantomas Affair (1932). The spring of 1932 saw the dismantling of a Soviet spy — network comprised of French Communist Party members. The affair exposed French deficiencies at a time when counterintelligence services were faced with mounting levels of German and Italian espionage. Those in charge of French counterintelligence were thus able to convince political and military leaders to restructure the fight against foreign intelligence. The French Communist Party's leadership, on the other side, took advantage of the scandal to get Moscow to stop recruiting Party members for espionage purposes.

The Socialist Intellectual Daniel Guerin in Germany: Before and After the Disaster. Already politically active without being yet the author of — the anthology Ni Dieu ni Maître, Daniel Guérin travelled to Germany for the first time in the summer of 1932, hoping to experience both the Socialist and Nazi revolutions. By the end of his second trip in June 1933, the young Socialist intellectual had been marked by the brown plague. This work attempts to decipher his travel narratives, his encounter with an unknown country and the notion of political otherness.

The Case of Annette Zelman and the Beginnings of the “Final Solution” in France (May-June 1942). On May 22nd, 1942, a twenty year-old Jewish girl named Annette Zelman was arrested in Paris after being denounced by her fiancé's father. One month later, she was deported to Auschwitz, where she ultimately died. This individual tragedy reminds us that for the Nazis, all Jews were meant to die; even in France, where the majority of Jews survived, anyone could be a target, including a French student from a privileged background like Zelman. Recently discovered and still unpublished family archives have given us the opportunity to investigate the full human dimension of this purely arbitrary case in the context of the beginnings of the “Final Solution” across Western Europe.

The Sipo-SD in Belgium. This article takes a fresh look at the role of the Sipo-SD — police force in occupied Belgium, often presented as all-powerful. However, this German police force was essentially a small bureaucratic institution that functioned reactively rather than proactively. Our analysis is structured around three hypotheses. Firstly, the Sipo-SD was merely one repressive apparatus among others. Secondly, its position within the German police force as a whole was not dictated by competition with other institutions, including the military administration. Thirdly, the political police did not form a homogeneous ensemble, but rather harboured several dividing lines.

The Helsinki Accords, or the Triumph of General de Gaulle's Pan-European Ideas. Signed on August 1st, 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was presented as the multilateral outcome of the policy of détente towards the countries of the Warsaw Pact, which had been introduced by Charles de Gaulle in the mid-1960s. While the Soviets saw their proposed conference on European security as a way of weakening ties between the United States and Western Europe, and of preserving the European political and territorial status quo, Georges Pompidou, on the other hand, agreed to the conference but sought to use it as a means of overcoming the Cold War's bipolar effects on Europe.

Michel Crozier, between France and United States. Outlining the history of the social sciences after 1945, — in the context of the increasingly transnational circulation of knowledge, obliges us to contemplate the international dimension of scientific careers. For Michel Crozier – one of the leading French social scientists post-1960 – his relation to the United States was crucial for the success of his career. Providing scientific opportunities, academic support and general intellectual inspiration, the United States were to him an amazing springboard. Nevertheless, as a consequence splitting his time between these two countries, Crozier's thought became the expression of critical distance towards both France and the United States. Ultimately, this perhaps explains his relative lack of fame on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Armenian Brass Band of the Negus. The first Ethiopian royal brass band was formed in 1924, — with forty children from the orphanage of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and an Armenian director who wrote the first Ethiopian national anthem. This event must be contextualised with regard to the employment of a significant number of Armenian servants and craftsmen at the Ethiopian court since the end of the 19th century, as well as with regard to the secular ties maintained between the Ethiopian monarchy and the Armenian Church. In the context of unprecedented European immigration and the colonial threat facing this African state (the only one to have been admitted into the League of the Nations), the establishment of the Armenian brass band of the Negus revealed the political use of the representation of foreigners handed down by Ethiopian rulers of the beginning of the 20th century.

“Religious” and Pan-African Trade Unionists. This article investigates the “religious” trade-unionist — networks in French-speaking Africa during the 1960s. The balkanization of unions, less well known than Africa's political balkanization, went hand in hand with the continued strengthening of Pan-African ties. These ties existed in both formalised and non-formalised arrangements, for example within international organisations such as the PanAfrican Union of Religious Workers. Even after various nations obtained independence, strong relationships were still preserved with the trade unions of the former colonial governments, and also with international trade unions. The necessities of national construction, as well as the vagaries of politics, influenced the practices of trade unions, where the main stakeholders can alternatively be at the pinnacle of power, in prison or in exile.

Competition and Common Ground Within Youth Movements. Youth movements emerged as innovative socio-educational — organisations, which presented a unique trajectory in Alsace starting at the end of the First World War. Converging on the global objective of educating children and adolescents according to pioneering principles and pedagogies, and at the same time permeated by the specific political, ideological and religious issues of the Alsace region, the interactions of these youth movements oscillated between conflict and cooperation. However, as competition progressively gave way to collabo ration, this dialogue appeared more and more fruitful, allowing youth movements to occupy a prominent position as regional institutions of socialisation until the mid-1960s.