Contenu du sommaire : L'historien dans la Cité. Actualités d'une question classique

This article offers a diachronic series of reflections on historical imaginaries, and their political uses, in France. It begins with a typological sketch of how history has been used in French political debate, then briefly shows how these schemes have evolved from the late 19th century through to the Gaullist era, before finally reflecting on the situation since the 1980s, with the resurgence of an idealised historical vision centered on the Third Republic.

Over the past ten years, French history and how it is taught have been objects of intense controversy in the public sphere. Some have seen global history as leading to the abandonment of national history. The Histoire mondiale de la France, by contrast, an edited volume bringing together the work of 122 historians, demonstrates the extent to which world history and transnational history can contribute to renewing and energizing French history in a way that reconciles narrative, scholarship and an open attitude towards the rest of the world.

A historian who specializes in contemporary French history and Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, Andrew Knapp considers the mobilization of the British historians who came together in the “Historians for Britain in Europe” association. Knapp was one of the leading instigators of this movement arguing for Great Britain to remain in the European Union. In this article, he discusses his experience as part of the 2016 Brexit remain campaign. The historian sheds light on his peers' involvement in this crucial question for European political life and underscores the difficulties they encountered in trying to make their oice heard in a debate characterized by strong disagreements between the two camps – disagreements that also affected British historians.

In Poland, historians occupy a special place in the field of social sciences for several reasons. If historical scholarship enjoys a high standing there, it is due to the vicissitudes of Polish history. During periods when the country was deprived of sovereignty (1792-1918 and 1939-1989), some historians participated in historical debates within resistance and opposition movements. After 1989, the exceptional proliferation of historical studies was accompanied by the emergence of new historical institutions and public action tools (the creation of the Institute for National Memory in 1999 as well as of various museums, national textbook revision, etc.) Since the 2000s, issues surrounding contradictory narratives of modern history and the role played by major actors in that history have undergone political radicalization.

Since the change of regime in 1989, Hungarian historical scholarship has freed itself from the principles that prevailed in the post-war years. Among other things, the list of forbidden or highly indeologized subjects included the Holocaust, the sovietization of Hungary and, of course, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Thanks to the emergence of new universities and new institutes, the institutional landscape evolved but liberalization also laid the groundwork for the emergence of more questionable structures. An example of these contradictions reflecting the polarization of political life can be found in the interpretation of the Horthy regime. The present-day government engages in historical falsification while some civil society actors and historians attempt to combat it.

During the past year, it has become common to speak of “the migrant crisis,” or “the refugee crisis”. Scholars and intellectuals have critically questioned whether the rhetoric of “crisis” comes from the fact that many feel a “threat” to Europe's Christian “civilization”, deriving from the fear that a large amount of the people arriving are not “white” but “Muslim”, representing a possible “terrorist” threat. Closely linked is the more general fear of insufficient – also emotional – capacities to absorb these migrants into our societies. In this context, historians can play a fundamental role in analyzing, explaining, and questioning migration as a phenomena and process, for instance, by engaging in a history of knowledge as well as using an intersectional approach. This helps to analyze different actors at the junctures of varieties of categorical differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and religion, which allows for an epistemic enlargement of current analyses on inclusion/exclusion and inequalities in European societies.

How can historical research and teaching contribute to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism? Following a brief review of the various approaches to the history of minorities and genocides and a critique of the excessive hopes that have been placed on memory policies, the author offers a few avenues that will allow universities to become more effectively involved in these issues.

Over the past forty years, the issue of ecology has taken various forms and has been accompanied by a profound reconfiguration of the intellectual and political domains. These debates have aroused interest among historians. Political ecology, in particular, has contributed to rethinking narratives and visions of the past, resulting in the emergence of the rich and dynamic field of environmental history. Historians were long skeptical vis-à-vis the issue of ecology: as specialists of human society, they gladly surrendered the physical world to their colleagues in the natural sciences; enlightened by their familiarity with past disasters, they mistrusted the apocalyptic-type discourse encountered in ecologist circles. Yet the ecological and environmental debates they constantly encounter have tested their analytical categories, working methods and the form taken by their involvement in public life.

In 1927, for the first time ever, the Finnish Social Democrats held power alone in a minority government. Eleven months later, however, they were once again driven back into the opposition after the in fact quite moderate reforms they had proposed that fall were rejected. With the country's workers increasingly eager for a fight, they nevertheless chose to seek alliances with the “center” and take a “constructive” approach towards their successors instead of confronting those who had brought them down. The present article seeks to understand the reasons for this political shift. Although it had been in the works for several years, it sharply accelerated and was accompanied by growing hostility towards more left-wing parties. As a strategy, it was not without its risks or illusions.

In 1934, Élie Halévy, a professor of English political and intellectual history and the history of socialism at the École libre des sciences politiques, decided to include a lesson on the “Roosevelt Experiment” in his course on Socialism in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. A fragmentary set of documents (students' notes, the professor's lecture notes, bibliographies) allow one to reconstruct the content of this American lesson. This unprecedented example of how a French intellectual greeted the New Deal in the 1930s simultaneously illustrates the channels, social circles and networks that shaped its reception, the cultural and methodological obstacles (contemporary history) impeding intellectual work and the interaction between national concerns and transnational discussions in the doctrinal reorganization of knowledge regarding the state, economy and society in the 1930s.

This contribution traces the origins and early years of the Association pour la démocratie locale et sociale (ADELS), which was created in 1959, by examining the activist and professional profiles of its main founding members. Originating in the progressive Christian movement, the leading aim of the ADELS was to inform and train the elected officials of the “New Left” through its monthly bulletin, Correspondance municipale. Local democracy, social housing, development, urbanism and the living environment immediately became the main concerns of this popular education-type network structure.

This article addresses the contribution of historians to the investigation of Maurice Audin's disappearance in Algiers in 1957 as well as the investigation itself, which resumed in the 2000s. For this disappearance is at the origin of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's campaign against torture. Still unexplained, it gave rise to new revelations a half century later, this time involving a trio of investigators: a journalist, a documentary filmmaker and a historian. In addition to the epistemological issues raised by their collaboration, the article examines the issues and dead ends presented by these belated revelations.

This unprecedented documentary collection brings together the indirect (students' notes and bibliographies) and fragmentary (course plans and notes, preparatory documents) traces of an oral lesson that Élie Halévy on two occasions gave at the École libre des sciences politiques (Paris) in the framework of his course on “Socialism in Europe in the Nineteenth Century”.