Contenu du sommaire : Provocations

Provocation is an essential notion in cultural history. It is linked to that of transgression, also coming from the notion of norm. It leads to working on cultural norms and transgression, essential elements of societies' metabolism and its collective representations. It is true that at the same time, such an approach must be recognized as being difficult to put into practice as the norm comes from what will be called, for lack of a better term, a period's sensibility. Here are the representations and imaginations, and thus what marks, just as much as law or customs, individual and collective behaviors within a given human community at a given date. This is both an immense area since it touches private life and intimacy and impermeable to a historian's research since it concerns notions as complex as the relation to the body or with the Other. The article aims to circumscribe this area by bringing up three cases from the same decade, the 1960s.

More attention is often paid to cultural avant-gardes than to established and popular currents. Yet around 1900, popular or bedroom comedies also regularly provoked the public by upsetting certain moral conventions; the history of their reception in the provinces and in Italy was sprinkled with frequent clashes. Beyond these reactions, many critics believed that these plays, including the most virulent by Courteline or Georges Feydeau, were of no consequence. This is what other astute theater critics contested, starting at the Belle Époque, at the same time as Henri Bergson and others questioned the meaning of laughter. These transgressions enabled popular theatre to serve the society as harsh revelators. It also reshaped the culture of the bourgeoisie habitually considered as immobile. And lastly, it had a long-lasting influence on playwrights and movie directors, foreign for the most part (Pirandello, Ernst Lubitsch, etc.), who then wrote works in the 1920s and 1930s in which provocation was close at hand.

The reggae version of La Marseillaise, recorded by Serge Gainsbourg in 1979, was denounced as a profanation. Michel Droit's polemic in Le Figaro perhaps falsified the interpretation of this song by emphasizing, partially wrongly, its provocative nature. Other adaptations of national anthems, from La Marseillaise interpreted by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, to the Sex Pistols' rendition of the British anthem, were not considered blasphemous. Gainsbourg was thus condemned to be perceived as a provoker in everything he did. Going back over the steps of the polemic raised by Gainsbourg shows the necessity of thinking about the autonomy of cultural production. The scandal stemmed from Gainsbourg's reputation. The intentionality of the aim to be provocative counted less than the offended's (Michel Droit) desire to accept the challenge and become the victim, bringing into question the very identity of the one he wanted to put forward as the aggressor. The provocative nature of the adaptation came above all from the fact that Gainsbourg is Gainsbourg.

In a political life made more and more antiseptic by media consultants, Jean-Marie le Pen stood out by his many provocations that continued during the electoral rooting of the Front national, from 1983-2002. Refusing to be limited by a purely psychological explanation, this article attempts to understand the motivations of these provocations. They were first part of an authoritarian, extreme right political culture of protestation. They thus unified a militant community. They reinforced the non-conformist image of the far right leader. They guaranteed the presence of the Front National in the media, thanks to the reactions they provoked. They enabled Jean-Marie Le Pen to solidify his relations with his constituency since they kept the Front National from moving towards the traditional right wing.

During the Italian campaign, 1943 and 1944, the French expeditionary corps colonial troops were responsible for many acts of violence against the Italian civilian population. Theft, armed robbery, plunder, and especially rape were very frequent. At the beginning they were isolated acts committed by single individuals, and punished by the French or Anglo-American allied authorities. During the 1944 victorious summer offensive that made it possible to cross the Gustav line in the southern Lazio, the French troops garnered from their superiors a relative liberty of action, leading to rapes. During the 1950s, the Unione Donne Italiane counted about twelve thousand victims of sexual violence. This communist women's organization tried to obtain compensation for these women victims of the French expeditionary corps. This sexual violence was apparently tolerated as a “disagreeable” consequence of the war habits of irregular corps such as Moroccan goumiers [soldiers from a goum, an auxiliary military body of native North Africans, under French officers' authority]. They were also a clear message to Italians, particularly the men. The humiliation and sexual outrage against their wives served to reassert their status as the conquered during this conflict.

As scholars have said since the end of the Second World War, several thousand Jews (French and refugees) were not deported or delivered to the Germans. The Italian armed forces and civil authorities interned them in camps where living conditions were awful but by far better than in the Croatian or German extermination camps. This article answers the question as to why the fascist, racist and antisemitic regime, allied with Nazi Germany since 1939, refused to deliver the Jews living in the territories militarily occupied by the Italian armed forces after November 1942. It refers to generally unpublished Italian sources; it examines the events from a political context of military occupation and the difficult relations with the Vichy government and the Germany ally; it takes into consideration the nature and specific aims of antisemitism as well as the fascist ideology while acknowledging the total failure of the regime's expansionist plans. The article rejects the notion of the italiani brava gente (the good Italians) as an a priori explanation of the events and verifies the hypothesis that the policy toward the Jews represented the most peremptory reaction to Nazi intervention in the area reserved for Italian affairs.

“In Spain today, In Italy tomorrow!” This message, broadcast over Radio Barcelona airwaves by the Italian antifascist Carlo Rosselli in November 1936, would become the rallying cry of the Italian involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Both an invitation and a warning, Roselli's cry not only served as a foil for the limitations of the antifascist struggle led from the exiles' host countries, it also stirred up the possibility of a revolutionary upheaval in Europe. The Spanish Civil War not only provided a much longed-for opportunity to turn around the “moribund” antifascist movement, but also, and maybe even more importantly, it served as a necessary step towards the reworking of political options and the reconstruction of antifascist activism. This paper attempts to understand the motivation behind the support and involvement of three Italian antifascist fringe groups (the Italian Republican Party, the Azione repubblicana e socialista, and the Giustizia e Libertà movement) on the side of Republican Spain. These fringe groups acted like free electrons in the complex milieu of Italian political exile, but a close analytical study of this defining, if not crucial, moment of history allows us the opportunity to shed some light on a broader vision of the international struggle against fascism.

Götz Aly's book, Hitlers Volksstaat (Hitler's popular state), published in Germany in March 2005, was a real publishing phenomenon. Thousands of copies of this academic book were sold. How can this rush be explained? The author discusses the attraction national socialism had for the great majority of Germans, not by ideology or by Hitler's magnetism, but by material interest. The Third Reich thus “bought” the Germans by distributing material advantages, lowering taxes, granting various payments. This was supposedly financed by the spoliation of Jewish goods first in Germany and then throughout occupied Europe, and by the exploitation of slave labor. German historians' reception of this book was reserved and almost always negative, unlike the public's. The analysis of the debates provoked by Götz Aly's book describes the recent developments of the historiography of national-socialism and the Shoah in Germany.

Although this article belongs in the general context of German public administration during nazism, its precise subject concerns a ministry created in 1941, the Eastern occupied territories. It studies the ideological and ethical representations of the major civil servants of this ministry in order to show the meaning they gave to their roles and actions. These representations played a role in the policies they proposed at their level of competence as well as in the way they described the situations they were confronted with. While the civil servants' thinking often went along with a practical sense of the distinctions between the ideologically necessary and the economically useful, it also included the essential elements of the traditional ethics of public service. The study of this thinking contributes to enriching the image as a whole of the Ostministerium, too often centered on the minister himself or on often remarkable personalities like Erich Koch or Wilhelm Kube.

In September 1901, a coalition of Christian parties won the Dutch legislative elections under the leadership of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. Colonial issues were given a strategic dimension by the new government, which strongly advocated the “moral reform” of the Netherlands' colonial policy in the Far East. The “ethical colonial policy” (1901- c.1926), which was defended both by leaders of the conservative Christian parties and by members of the worker-led social-democratic movement, aimed at fulfilling the “moral obligation” of the metropolitan state towards the native population of the East Indies. By focussing on the “moral education” of the native Javanese, this article begins by summarizing the institutional and political developments that gave birth to this “ethical policy”. It then examines a number of actions taken by the colonial state in Java concerning educational policy, medical and hygienic modernisation, prison reforms and political “decentralization”. The article demonstrates how these public policies were seen as contributing to the “moral reform” of the native Javanese, by introducing them to a capitalist, bureaucratic and Christian “modernity” – a modernity ultimately deemed to be contradictory with political protest and Islamic mobilization.

The football World Cup of June 1938 has largely been overlooked by historians of sport interested in the interwar period, overshadowed by more high profile sporting events such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the Tour de France, and by interest in the sport and leisure policies of the Popular Front. This article will explore the nature and success of the 1938 football tournament, discussing it in relation to contemporary debates about spectator sport and to the phenomena of tourism and consumer spectacles. Although a significant popular and commercial success in its own right, the tournament's relatively low profile, certainly in comparison with the 1998 instalment, suggests both the lower general cultural status of football in France in this early era and the entrenched unwillingness of the French state to involve itself with spectator sport until after the Second World War. Although willing to see the Olympic Games as a vehicle for cultural grandeur as early as 1924, in the interwar period the French state remained blind to the potential of professional football to achieve the same ends.

This article studies how expertise from the administration was requested by Parliamentary commissions in the early 20th century. The focus is also on the links between the administration and scientific circles, links that spill over onto the types of expertise provided. The question of the autonomy of the high-level civil service directors towards their minister and Parliament is also raised. More specifically, the reconstruction of an episode that occurred in the commission du travail (Labor Committee) shows the competition between the Members of Parliament and the government for control of the administration's departments. Lastly, the question of the place of high-ranking civil servants in relation to the government is brought up, particularly through the case of the director of Labor, Arthur Fontaine.

The historiography of the relations between the cinema and Catholicism since the 1910's has not been widely studied, but is gradually gaining ground. This article contributes to this emerging subject by examining the commitment of one of the most famous French priests of the interwar period, Edmond Loutil. Father Loutil was a parish priest in Paris, a columnist for La Croix, and a successful novelist. He was convinced that French Catholics were too timid when confronted with the popular press and so, in 1925, he undertook the task of reconciling the Christian message with popular culture. To further his cause, he took part in the making of commercial films, published articles, gave speeches, made efforts to provide parishes with essential funds, and praised the far-reaching value of the new media and its capacity to serve as an apology for Catholicism to his fellow religious leaders. Father Loutil possessed several disparate attributes – a lack of real professional expertise, an openness to technological modernity, an overestimation of the impact of ideological films, a clear adherence to the Catholic agenda, and an acknowledgement of the rights of creation and refusal of anathemas, all of which contributed to the nature of his campaign. This campaign lasted several years and contributed to an important turning point at the end of the 1920's, when Catholic cinema moved from a pioneering age to an age of expansion. All throughout, Edmond Loutil's actions leaned on the press and the Assumptionist publication La Bonne Presse.

In Les Vérités inavouables de Jean Genet (Seuil 2004), Ivan Jablonka has the ambition of renewing the approach to the famous French writer, showing how much support he derived from the Assistance publique, his supposed fascination for fascism, and the operation by which his exegetes, Sartre in particular, made him out to be an oppressed rebel against the established order. This approach did not totally convince Ludivine Bantigny who points out several obstacles in the interpretation and reasoning. Their disagreement led to a debate that was both contradictory and positive concerning the history of his irregular childhood and the nature of fascism, but also, more generally, on the exercise of biography and relations between history and criticism.