Contenu du sommaire

" The eye of the storm ". The United States and the Persian Gulf from 1945 to 1990, Pierre Mélandri. The first crisis of the cold war occurred in 1946 and concerned Iran. As for the first post-cold war confrontation, it pitted a formidable international coalition directed by Washington against Iraq. These two " firsts " faithfully reflect the vital interest America has shown in the Persian Gulf region since the end of the Second world war. But this interest was manifested in doctrines which were not based only on a possible use of force to maintain the Vax americana in the region. The multiplicity of domestic and external parameters, not the least of which has been the Israeli-Arab conflict, demanded delicate diplomacy.

State Jews in Franco-French wars. From Boulangism to the Popular Front, Pierre Birnbaum. The Franco-French war mechanism, i.e. the intense radicalization of political conflict, includes antisemitism as one of its major elements. At such times, " state Jews ", those directly involved in the civic debates and belonging to the circles of power, attract a major part of the passions and hatreds that rent the social body. Alfred Naquet, who attempted the impossible wager of being both Jewish and Boulangiste ; Joseph Reinach, who polarized the antisemitic violence of the Dreyfus affair ; Léon Blum, the first Jewish President of the Council of Ministers : these three emblematic figures illus- trate, in different ways, the central place which antisemitism occupied in the political culture of the adversaries of the model embodied by the Third Republic.

Hollywood in the French movie clubs, Emmanuelle Loyer. Starting from a precise analysis of Ciné-Club, the magazine of the French federation of movie clubs, it is easy to discern the assumptions of the vigorously anti-American discourse that prevailed in the French movie clubs after Liberation. Hollywood was the " dream factory ", its cinema a frivolous weapon of the cold war. But reverence unto the great American moviemakers, Chaplin, Welles, or Griffth, partly ruined this polemic set of arguments. Many weaknesses in the French cinema were revealed by obstinate debating about the Amercan cinema.

The Gabrielle Russier affair, Corinne Bouchoux. In the summer and the fall of 1969, Gabrielle Russier, a professor of literature in a Marseille lycée, was judged and condemned for having had a love affair with one of her students. An emblematic figure and a victim for some, and a seductress and guilty woman for others, the teacher found herself confronted with three institutions that were under going a deep crisis : the family, the school, the judiciary. Beyond a conflict between individuals who wanted to apply 1968 " ideas " and those who defended traditional values, this human interest story revealed some of the contradictions French society was experiencing, at a time when the " events of May " had not yet been overcome.

The Yugoslav national conflict, Catherine Lutard. The disappearance of Yugoslavia, the Federation of Southern Slavs warrants a historic positioning of the conflicts among its nationalities. Tito had promoted a federalism which did not resist the collapse of socialism : during the 1980s, a national crisis settled in against a background of economic and social troubles, today, one can only be pessimistic about the future of the Yugoslav federation.