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Clemenceau and Greece, Jean-Noël Jeanneney. "You have to go to Greece to get anywhere else," said Clemenceau, who admired above all the power-hammer eloquence of a Demosthenes. At the time when lawyers and professors were marked by Ciceron, the philhellenic Tiger united word and conviction, discussion and combat, reason and liberty. It was a strongly Athenian definition of the French Republic that is worth recalling today, 80 years after the 1918 victory.

Great War and Humanitarian Diplomacy: the Swiss Catholic Mission for War Prisoners (1914-1918), Frédéric Yerly. "War culture": behind this newly forged concept are hidden socio-cultural habits and practices that went through the First World War from beginning to end. A new and vast historiographic field for research is opening up today in which collective representations as well as each person's imagination get the lion's share. An extraordinary situation demands extraordinary practices and behavior. Spiritual and religious needs born out of contact with fire or tests of captivity haven't stopped gaining in importance and intensity. This has pleased churches and religious charity works suffering from de-Christianization and exclusion in now largely secularized public spaces. Either temporary or lasting beyond the end of hostilities, religious needs were expressed by the soldiers, of course, but also by another category, poorly known because less studied until today: war prisoners. Our study, based on Catholic charity archives, deals with the religious practices and needs during prisoners' captivity. These charities, with the agreement of the opponents and from the beginning of the war, visited the detention camps regularly. The Catholic Mission for war prisoners was at the twisting and turning interface of the humanitarian cause and politics. It was the stakes of a curious and complex diplomatic ballet in which the fighting states' governments, the non-governmental charities, and the Vatican, supported by the local hierarchies via the church works, crisscrossed.

The Normandie Liner and the press (1929 -1935), Philippe Garnaud. In January 1931, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique began building the Normandie to the general indifference of the press. Its construction was synonymous of wild expense in a context of economic crisis. The press began to get on to it really in 1932 when it was launched and then for its inaugural voyage in 1935. The Normandie then became the stakes of one of the biggest political controversies of its time.

From Solidarité Française to the Faisceau français: an Example of Political Radicalization, Gilles Lahousse. From 1933 to 1939 Solidarité Française, founded by François Coty, went through deep changes. Anchored in the beginning to the national tradition of referenda, it radicalized its discourse and methods to the extreme so that it was no more than a tiny group close to fascism at the dawn of the Second World War. The political takeover by Jean-Renaud at François Coty's death, the competition with other leagues, and the hardening of the international situation explain this radicalization which made Solidarité Française a characteristic example of the political crisis of the 1930s.

The Anti-fascist Reflex. The Anti-fascist and Anti-war Committees in the Loiret (1934 - 1936), François Marlin. In the Loiret, a French département (administrative division) with a radical leaning, an incredibly vital anti-fascist Committee was set up following February 6, 1934. Directed by communists, it nevertheless included many socialists and radicals. It managed to inaugurate a "Popular Front" in the rank and file in 1935 before falling victim to the divisions that occurred within the Rassemblement populaire after the 1936 electoral victory.

Jérôme Carcopino, from Triumph to the Tarpeian Rock, Stéphanie Corcy-Debray. From the Sorbonne to Vichy, in passing by l'École française de Rome and the management of the École Normale Supérieure, Jérôme Carcopino's itinerary is that of an ambitious historian attracted by power. In February 1941, backed by a brilliant international career and a solid network beyond academia then at the height of its reputation, he was called to a national role. He brought to the Vichy regime the whole weight of his experience of the world of education and especially its renown. The ministry provided him with a national tribune and the possibility of implementing his elitist and sectarian educational conceptions. In April 1942, wounded and deposed, he left the public scene and underwent the supreme humiliation of being judged for national indignity at the Liberation.

The Conseil d'État and the Vichy Régime, Jean Massot. The history of the Conseil d'Etat in the period 1940 - 1944 has long been placed under the heading "Gaullist myth". The institution was supposed to have gone through this period remaining faithful to its traditions and preserving its republican principles to the best of its ability. While the analysis of the jurisprudence from his return to Paris in July, 1942 globally confirms this judgment by René Cassin himself in 1944, the opening of the archives, like the analysis of the role of some of its members, leads to a shading of this statement and the observation that like most French people, the Conseil, at least until 1942, put up very well with the new regime in spite of its exclusionary measures of which many of its members had already been its first victims. Was that its price for survival?

The Resistance, Education and Culture, Jean-François Muracciole. The Resistance did not limit its action to political and military areas. In the darkness of clandestinity, in Free France or within the framework of intellectual emigrations, it undertook an immense effort of thinking on education and culture. Its projects, nourished by the Popular Front and the 1930s experience, but also by Vichy's and Anglo-Saxon governments' accomplishments, were marked by the overwhelming weight of the 1940 debacle. Analyzing the defeat as the consequence of the collapse of traditional elites, the resisting intellectuals drew the outlines of a vast reform of the educational System. A sharp difference of appreciation emerged between the resistants from the interior and the Free French, a consequence of divergent analyses of the defeat. The project of the Resistance that couldn't be applied at the Liberation provided the matrix for the educational and cultural policy of the de Gaullian Fifth Republic.

The "Grenoble Myth" in the 1960s. A Political Use of Modernity, Bernard Bruneteau. In the 1960s, the city of Grenoble was set up as the symbol of modernity. A model of expansion, it was also the symbol of municipal management based on the control of urban development, citizen participation and the centrality of the new middle classes. Through its success, Grenoble became a myth that structured French political life and was able to nourish the Mendesian as well as the Gaullist Systems of reference.

A News Item in the Media Spiral: From the Philippe Bertrand to the Patrick Henry Affair, Christian Delporte. From the media coverage of a news item - the 1976 assassination of a 7-year old boy following a demand for ransom - the role of the media in public opinion reaction can be analyzed. While the murderer's arrest was widely covered by the written press and radio and television maintaining a feverish climate pitting the partisans against the opponents of the death penalty, it is possible that the astonishing serenity around the trial and its outcome was due to a new media attitude. This affair poses the question of the weight and role of the media in the mental and legislative transformations of a country.