Contenu du sommaire

De Gaulle and French History, Maurice Agulhon. Maurice Agulhon explains "a certain idea of France" that Charles de Gaulle drew from the history of his country. France as a person, the weight of origins, and the dialectic of the national and providential : general de Gaulle's constant reflection on these three questions made him a French Sisyphus, inimitable and dated.

"Intellectual Catholics"? History of a Postponed Birth, Etienne Fouilloux. How can it be explained that French catholic intellectuals did not have an official body before the 1945 creation of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français (CCIF) (Catholic Center of French Intellectuals) ? The first obstacle was French. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, the Catholics took objection to the word "intellectual, because it was associated with a Dreyfusard fight that the majority of them didn't share. This incompatibility continued in the period between the two wars, in spite of a renewal marked by the flowering of Catholic-inspired intellectual journals, in spite also of the waves of conversions from 1880 to 1930. On the Catholic side, the inheritance of the modernist crisis discredited any autonomy of Catholic thinkers with regard to the religious Catholic authorities. Theologians were relegated to the role of the training of Catholic elites and of the explanation of pontifical texts that kept them outside of intellectual debate. While the condemnation of the Action française in 1926 released the stranglehold and gave the floor to "civil theologians", it was after 1945 that the church became aware of the wrongs that this marginalization was subjecting it to. The involvement of Catholic intellectuals in public debate showed the interest of hearing a Christian voice without in-volving Rome directly. The intellectuals fully in the 1950 fights, but the reciprocal suspicion between them and the religious authorities inherited from previous decades never disappeared.

The Shanghai Purge (1945-1946). The Sarly Affair and the End of the French Concession, Marie-Claire Bergère. After climbing up the rungs of the administrative and police ladder of the French concession in Shanghai before the war and during Vichy, Roland Sarly became the target of the political purge launched by the Chinese nationalist government as of 1945. His example showed both the difficulties of a political purge in the context of Shanghai as well as the liquidation of the French presence in the region.

Tahiti With and Without the Bomb, Jean-Marc Regnault. Since 1963, French Polynesia has been a rich but undeveloped territory. Political autonomy, more and more widely granted since 1977, has not reduced economic dependence. With the stopping of nuclear testing (1996), there are two opposing approaches. One sees the key to development in independence. The other counts on aid from the mother country to succeed the post-bomb era and end an artificial wealth.

The Trial of the Protocols of the Sages of Sion. An Attempt of Jewish Retaliation to the Anti-Semitism of the 1930s, Catherine Nicault. In 1933, when the copies of the Protocols of the Sages of Sion began to proliferate around Germany, the Swiss Jewish leaders undertook a legal battle, counting that the proof of falsehood would hinder the Nazi offensive against the Jews and democracy.

The Unfinished Genesis of the Greens, Bruno Villalba. The Greens, an ecological movement that appeared in the French political

1960s Pop Culture in England, Bertrand Lemonnier. The 1960s pop culture, of which the Beatles were the emblematic figure, remains a little-explored historical field. The historicity of pop is generally underestimated and "young people's culture" is willfully denigrated. Added to this are the methodological problems posed by the overabundance and diversity of available sources as well as the epistemological problems raised by the writing of a cultural history of the present time.