Contenu du sommaire : Histoire au présent de la "political correctness"

Aimless canon shots "Western civilization" in American universities, Denis Lacorne. The crisis of the American university, frequently denounced in the late 1980s, was supposed to be linked to the new pedagogical practices of the "modernists" and the "traditionalists". The former were said to be attempting to wean students from their western roots in the name of a proper multiculturalism; the latter advocated recourse to western tradition's great classics. Loudly denounced by the media, the opposition between modernists and traditionalists is highly exaggerated. Precise examples show that reference to the western canon keeps its predominant place in spite of the pressure of multicultural militants. But it is true that a new discourse is forming, based on the comparison of knowledge of "remote" cultures and the contribution of modem anthropology. Well handled, this discourse should enrich "civilization" programs.

A side glance. French attitudes and American multiculturalism (1990-1993), Marie-Christine Granjon. The author traces the stages of the reception of the American debate on multiculturalism in France, between 1990 and 1993. While rejection was virtually unanimous in the beginning, other, more subtle, views appeared subsequently. In both cases, concern about the French situation (identity and national culture) looms through the French view on the crisis of the American integration model.

Political correctness in the original language and in French translation. A revealing misunderstanding, Eric Fassin. In this affair, considered on both sides of the Atlantic, the misunderstanding is full of meaning. The pretended "Frenchness" of political correctness says a great deal about the fascinations and the rejections of French intelligence in the United States. In France, the quasi-unanimous denunciation of the "new McCarthyism" says even more about the excessively culturalist vision in which we enclose America. In the heat of the controversy, we fînd a confrontation between two public statuses and two models of the intellectual.

Seignobos revisited, Antoine Prost. Did Charles Seignobos really deserve the violent criticism of Lucien Febvre and the Annales in 1933? We should no longer be dupes of 50-year-old polemics. However incomplete and contradictory, history as practiced by Seignobos, and particularly contemporary history, was fully institutional and social, more global than was claimed, and above all, rich in the "analogical imagination" that should always seal the historian's professional work.