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Demonstrations, meetings and fairs in Paris (June 1936-November 1938), Danielle Tartakowsky. The Popular Front period saw the appearance of forms of mass mobilization which combined culture and politics, city and country fairs, dances, shows, readings and lectures. Besides these types of mobilization, which did not imply new types of action, there were traditional demonstrations and parades. The cohabitation reveals the dual relationship between the masses and the Popular Front : the Popular Front was their expression, but there were still conflicts and confrontations.

May Day 1936, between two elections and two epochs, Miguel Rodriguez. At first glance, between the two ballots of the parliamentary elections which were to consecrate the victory of the Popular Front, the celebration of May Day 1936 should logically have registered a strong political mobilization. Paradoxically, while the day was a real success for the recently reunified CGT, the election outcome seemed quite absent from people's worries. The celebration had less to do with the immediate political situation than with a more general process : the gradual integration of the « workers' day » in the collective habits, with militant mobilization becoming little by little a ritual gathering.

The Popular Front May Day in the provinces (1936-1939), Antoine Prost. During the Popular Front, were May Day celebrations special in scope or contents ? The analysis of provincial May Days reveals a curve which began with growing mobilization in 1936 registered an apparent triumph in 1937 and 1938, and ended with a noticeable decrease in 1939. Beyond the particular problems of trade union and political conditions, there was a deeper change : in the late 1930s, the first of May celebration had become less a protest than the expression of an identity, and, little by little, a holiday « like any other ».

The Creuse feasts, Georges Danger. The Popular Front feast displayed two characteristics : it associated politics and entertainment, and it was meant to favor both unity and pluralism. It was at the same time a revolutionary celebration, a political rally, a municipal fair, and a veterans' banquet. In rural Creuse, the Popular Front feasts had also a pagan inspiration which evoked old myths. Above all, the immediate prewar civic feast refered to the Revolutionary civic feast without any need for mediation.

Popular leisure in Poitiers, Noëlle Gérôme. Known through a local newspaper, Le Front populaire de la Vienne, leisure activities in the Poitiers region displayed a religious, symbolic and political syncretism, which reflected the deep penetration of the Popular Front values as well as the social and cultural foundations which helped it. The study also identifies the local expressions of the national values which inspired the Popular Front's actors. The Poitiers case shows how exogenous rules and patterns must face the local ability to understand, transcribe, and assimilate them, with reference to indigenous structures.

Happiness as praxis in the Pyrénées-Orientales, Michel Cadet. In the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Communist Party perfected at the time of the Popular new militant practices. Based on the press, cultural activities, performances and folk feasts, these practices developed a new way of being together, in which militants and sympathizers, intellectuals and manual workers learned to know each other. Rooted in a solid local tradition, they depended nonetheless very closely on the Communist Party's national strategy.

Writing a contemporary history of urbanism, Rémi Baudoui, Alain Faure, Annie Fourcaut, Martine Morel, Danièle Woldman. Are the historian's tools adequate to grasp the industrial and post-industrial city ? The French historiographie tradition seems to have met an obstacle, for its production in this field is relatively underdeveloped. Defining the object of urban history precisely, looking for explicanatory keys to the processes which operate in the large urban areas, finding appropriate methods which would claim for the contribution of the other disciplines could open up wide research fields.