Contenu du sommaire : Cent ans

FROM THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE DOCUMENTATION INTERNATIONALE CONTEMPORAINE TO LA CONTEMPORAINE The article provides an overview of the hundred years of existence of the institution, revealing the highlights of its history. The library, archive and museum has been able to follow the evolution of historical and documentary culture and to remain faithful to its original spirit: to be a place of collaborative elaboration of historical knowledge where civil society and academic circles meet.

BUILDING LA CONTEMPORAINE: A FULL PROGRAMME ! The new building of La contemporaine - Bibliothèque, archives, archives, musée des mondes contemporains will be open to the public in 2021, on the campus of the University Paris Nanterre. The journal Matériaux met with its architect, Bruno Gaudin. The interview is preceded by a presentation of the project and its objectives: to build a “new BDIC” that will allow for the gathering in one place of collections kept for decades on two separate and distant sites.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO: THE BEGINNING OF THE GERMAN SECTION OF THE BMG This article looks back on the first years of the BDIC/BMG (Bibliothèque et Musée de la Guerre), mainly through the history of its German section between 1918 and 1935. What was the specificity of the collection for the Germanic area during this period? How was the collection work organized? This article features three prominent figures in the section: Jacques Crépet, Charles Appuhn, and Guy-Charles Cros.

THE MUSEE DE LA GUERRE IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD: ITEMS ACQUIRED, ITEMS DISPLAYED This paper presents the acquisitions made by the Musée de la Guerre from 1917 to 1939: it looks back on the nature of the items acquired and the acquisition methods. It also shows the prominent role played in this process by artists and art critics such as Raoul Dufy, Jean-Émile Laboureur, and especially René-Jean. The presentation of these items had to meet what was expected from a history museum. This has led, more than in art museums, to greater freedom in the choice of works acquired and immediately displayed for the public.

Hélène Kaplan This article is a tribute to Hélène Kaplan, chief curator and head of the Central and Eastern Europe section of the BDIC from 1975 to1993. It is followed by the translation of the homage paid on the site of the Russian Memorial Foundation, an institution whose purpose is to establish the truth on the history of Stalinist repression and the defense of human rights in Russia.

A SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL TO DO WHAT? The Chairman of the BDIC's Scientific Council explains its main tasks. Composed of researchers, archivists and librarians, the council first contributes to defining the BDIC's documentary policy by discussing the main areas of acquisitions and assessing the deposits of private archives. In addition to its contribution to collection making, the council discusses how to make the collections available to the public, as well as issues such as the definition of target audiences and the nature of the research projects involving the institution.

THE BDIC'S TRAINING POLICY For the past 15 years, the BDIC has been developing training activities for pupils and students. In many of these courses, they learn to analyse sources of contemporary European history. Since 2014, tools such as the cartable numérique have been used to support these training courses. They have made it possible to broaden the student audience beyond that of historians. The opening of the new building in 2021, with a permanent visitor's itinerary in the museum, opens up new perspectives for both the educational offer and the reception areas.

WHAT THE BDIC COLLECTIONS REVEAL ABOUT THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDANCE This article presents an overview of the BDIC's collections of periodicals and paper, photographic and audiovisual archives related to the Algerian war. The war appears above all in collections that are not specifically dedicated to it (left and extreme left militant archives), through the questions of law and justice raised by the fight against the FLN (Delarue and De Félice collection) and in the immigration collections, particularly the history of the Nanterre slums (photographs by Pottier and Kagan, Hervo collection). The collections reveal a diffuse presence of Algeria in French history, which goes beyond the war of independence.

ARCHIVES AND AUDIOVISUAL SOURCES OF INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY WITH CHILE. A SEMINAR REPORT (2015-2017) After the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, the military junta's opponents who came to power faced a violent repression. Solidarity actions were organized with the victims all around the world until Pinochet's departure in 1990. These actions have been associated with filmed images, photographs, graphic works, music and radio broadcasts, which have been disseminated internationally. One of the objectives of the seminar was to open up a space for discussion between researchers, curators and witnesses, but also filmmakers, artists, actors, and other memory givers. Another was to establish a national and international mapping of archives and collection projects.

ABOUT THE BDIC' S PIERRE RENOUVIN/JEAN-BAPTISTE DUROSELLE INTERVIEWS PROGRAM During the preparation of the conference Pierre Renouvin, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle (1917-2017). The construction of a discipline, the history of international relations, co-organized by the Institut Pierre Renouvin and the BDIC on 7-9 June 2017, a campaign of interviews with academics who had been witnesses to the action of the two historians began. The aim of the project was to question them on their contacts with the two founders of the history of international relations in France, as well as to speak with them about their own trajectory.

ARCHIVES CITOYENNES DU FUTUR: DIGITAL ARCHIVING AT THE BDIC, A WORK IN PROGRESS For the past three years, the BDIC has been reflecting on the archiving of its digital and natively digital collections and has launched the project Archives citoyennes du futur. This expression refers to the characteristics of a large part of the institution's archives, which often come from associations. Several types of documents are included within the scope of the project: the new digital version of former paper repositories of private archives, such as the papers of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, audiovisual producers' archives (including rushes), as well as the digital recordings of BDIC's oral archive campaigns.

THE ARCHIVES OF THE LIGUE DES DROITS DE L'HOMME In 2018, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) will make available to researchers the archives of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme of the second half of the 20th century. A university conference and a virtual exhibition are also being prepared. These events are in continuity with the history of the library, which from its founding has developed extensive collections on the theme of human rights.

DANS L'ATELIER DE MARC FERRO, SYMPOSIUM, MARCH 7, 2017, UNIVERSITY PARIS NANTERRE The panel discussion entitled The co-production of knowledge between libraries, researchers, documentary filmmakers during the symposium organized by the BDIC, deals with the still unevenly recognized importance of audiovisual archives for the advancement of historical knowledge. Ferro recounts his own largely innovative experience in the field of historical studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and librarians from the BDIC, the University of Paris 3 and the EHESS report on their collaboration on audiovisual archives projects.

L'ALMANACH DU COMBATTANT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT WAR This article is devoted to the Almanach du combattant, published by the Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC) between 1921 and 1992. At the creation of the Library, this publication, which allows historians to understand the war experience and take into account the social and political issues related to demobilization, aroused interest. In 2016/17, the BDIC managed by various means to collect the entire collection, which had been very incomplete until then. Because of its unusual lifespan, the Almanach is an excellent observatory of how the memory of the Great War combatants has been structured.

CORRESPONDING DURING THE “PHONY WAR”, THE EXAMPLE OF RENÉE AND FRANÇOIS DODAT. Renée and François Dodat were a couple of young intellectuals immersed in the “phony war”. When François was sent to the frontline in September 1939, exchanging letters became their only way of staying in touch. In addition to offering a study on the link between military and home fronts, their almost daily correspondence invites us to discover a “phony war” on the human level.

VICTOR FAY: THE COMMUNIST WORLD AS SEEN BY AN “EX-COMMUNIST” The personal papers of Victor Fay, a figure of the French left born in Poland in 1903, are kept at the BDIC. They shed light on the itinerary of this man who, as he went from being a “professional revolutionary” to being a critical observer, can be considered as an expert and a committed historian of European communism. Fay contributed to the introduction of Marxism in France and to the development of an original thinking on the left of the political spectrum.

EMMANUEL NAQUET, POUR L'HUMANITÉ. LA LIGUE DES DROITS DE L'HOMME DE L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS À LA DÉFAITE DE 1940, RENNES, PUR, 2014. In this book, Emmanuel Naquet looks at the “first” history of the League. This one runs from its foundation in 1898, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, until its temporary disappearance in 1940, with the spoliation of its archives by the Nazi authorities. The relationship with the spheres of power is one of the overarching themes of the book. The variety of fields covered by the League's action is astonishing (policing of morals, military justice, unionization and the right to strike, laïcité, women's right to vote, etc.). This analysis shows how the League has been both a receptacle of and a facilitator for the reflection on human rights.

David Rousset, La fraternité de nos ruines. Écrits sur la violence concentrationnaire (1945-1970), Paris, Fayard, 2016. After David Rousset's death, his personal papers were deposited at the BDIC. Grégory Cingal, who processed the archival collection, offers here a sample with an introduction and comments. Twenty-five documents - correspondence, appeals, statements and unpublished texts - form a rich and varied collection. It sheds light on the key role played by David Rousset, from the late 1940s to the 1980s, in understanding a world for which he coined the word “concentrationnaire” and in the debate on the comparison between Nazi and Soviet repression.