Contenu du sommaire : Les gauches et les colonies

The Birth of Vietnamese Republicanism
This article explains the origins of Vietnamese republicanism by studying the story of one man, Phan Chau Trinh, at the intersection of global and colonial movements. French ideas did not arrive in Vietnam solely through the colonial school system. In fact, Phan Chau Trinh preferred to express his ideas in Chinese. Before going to Paris in 1909, he first visited China and Japan to study new ideas coming from the Western world. However, France and the colonial connection were nonetheless important. It is therefore important to take both facets into consideration to understand how and why republicanism found such fertile ground in Vietnam in the early 20th century.

Algeria's Engineering of Socialist Colonial Policy
This article analyses how colonial policy was developed by French socialist federations in colonised Algeria during the interwar period. It explores the federations' relations with the Socialist Party's national leadership and Algerian politics more broadly. It shows how doctrinal evolution was linked to the broadening of militant social horizons on the ground. In fact, the concept of colonial and colonialist socialism was gradually revised into a more nuanced vision that took into consideration the evolving socialist doctrine in Algeria. Nonetheless, the Algerian socialist movement ultimately had little influence on the colonial policy of the French Socialist Party as a whole.

The Comintern, the French Communist Party and the Call for Algerian independence (1926-1930)This article examines the difficulties faced by the French Communist Party in developing its anti-colonial activities in France and Algeria during the second half of the 1920s. The French Communist Party was the first political entity to call for the abolition of the indigenous status, and then for Algeria's independence. While following orders from Moscow, the Party encountered strong grassroots resistance on both sides of the Mediterranean, opposition that is meticulously described here using Comintern archives. The circulations and transactions that took place between Moscow, Paris, and Algiers within Communist circles are crucial to understand both the emergence of the Algerian national movement, and the birth of militant anti-colonialism in France.

The Messalistes and the French Left
This article analyses anti-colonial transactions between pro-independence Algerian activists and French revolutionaries during the interwar period. It focuses primarily on the organisation led by Messali Hadj, called the Étoile nord-africaine (the North African Star). The organisation's unique relationship with the labour movement and its evolution among Algerian immigrants in France differentiated it from other Algerian political entities. The period analysed in this article illustrates Algerian activists' quest for autonomy, as well as their search for alliances with their French comrades despite disappointments regarding the Popular Front.

Racial Issues on the Beaches of Los Angeles (1920s–1970s)While Los Angeles's beaches were officially desegregated in 1927, informal segregation persisted throughout the 20th century, either through violence or subtle territorial strategies. African Americans and Latinos nonetheless asserted their “right to the beach” by using diverse tactics, from founding a private beach club to fighting back against their aggressors. In the postwar era, racial minorities were more numerous at the beach and were consequently subject to intense police surveillance – while simultaneously, municipalities attempted to get rid of the last, now shameful traces of racial segregation along the shore. By looking at racial relations on urban beaches, a kind of leisure space that is rarely studied by historians, this article sheds light on the multiple spatial strategies used to contain and exclude people or, on the contrary, to subvert racial boundaries.

Homosexuality in the 1942 Swiss Penal Code
The elaboration of an article on “unnatural acts” in the 1942 Swiss Penal Code makes it possible to analyse the competing influence of legal experts and psychiatrists, as well as the formation of a consensus between French and German criminal traditions. The new norm decriminalised same-sex activity between adults, but specifically punished acts committed on minors (under twenty years old), abuse of distress, and homosexual prostitution. The goals were, inter alia, to avoid scandal and cases of blackmail, as well as suicides. In addition, the law sought to prevent the development of an activist movement as highly visible as the one witnessed in Germany before the Nazis' rise to power.

Julius Hallervorden's Medical Collection of Brains in the Federal Republic of Germany
In 1922, the German doctor Julius Hallervorden gave his name to a neurodegenerative disease that he had discovered with his colleague Hugo Spatz. In 1996, a campaign asked for his name to be removed on account of Hallervorden's work in the Nazi regime. Although Hallervorden did not directly participate in Action T4, the programme that forcibly euthanized the mentally ill, he did receive two thousand brains from the programme's victims in order to pursue his research. This article describes how this information about Hallervorden was only gradually revealed to the international medical community long after the fact. In 1945, Hallervorden did not deny having received the brains, but he refused to take any responsibility for the Action T4 programme. Until his death in 1965, Hallervorden systematically opposed the dissemination of any information about his past and rewrote his story several times, while receiving the support of his German colleagues.

Cinema and Dictatorship in North Korea
Instead of viewing North Korea from the outside in, this article examines what the regime tells its own subjects through film. From the beginning, the relationship between cinema and the dictatorship, with all its spectacular trappings, seemed essential. State cinema, while officially towing the socialist-realist line, also experienced several turning points, such as the release of Flower Girl in 1972. This famous blockbuster from the former Soviet bloc shows the emergence of Kim Jong-Il and Juche, the national North Korean ideology based on the resurgence of long-lost traditions. Behind a facade of de-politicisation, the film's hybrid form, combining Hollywood-like heroes and stars and Soviet populism, legitimises the politico-religious cult of the new hereditary Kim dynasty.

Pierre Bournel and “Death for France”The principle of honour in the Republic is an important mechanism to build cohesive communities and to integrate individuals into a national identity. It may also serve to exclude those deemed unworthy. To study the real power and the use of honour in the Republic, we follow the very meandering path taken by Pierre Bournel (1881-1916), the grandson of a convict from the Corrèze region, condemned for violent robbery at the age of twenty in Tours, and ultimately sent to Algeria in the “bataillons d'exclus” (the battalions of the outcasts of the French army) after serving his civil sentence. Having never been trained in combat, he would heroically sacrifice himself during the First World War in 1916.