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During the summer of 1956, Paul Teitgen, a high-ranking civil servant, was appointed to the Algiers police prefecture by the Guy Mollet government. Although he was entrusted with the mission of “republicanising” the colonial police force, by January 1957, Teitgen had in fact become a central figure of the “Battle of Algiers”. As a former member of the French Resistance and a survivor of Gestapo torture chambers and Nazi concentration camps, Teitgen was outraged by the routine use of torture and forced disappearance during the Algerian war. Attempting to criticise these actions from the perspective of his Christian and Republican values, Teitgen ended up publicly denouncing the crimes committed by the French Army. Drawing on the archives of the Algiers police prefecture, this article describes an exceptional and highly painful act of betrayal with echoes of the Dreyfus affair, set against the backdrop of a colonial war.

During the Algerian War of Independence, metropolitan France and its colony gradually merged into a single theatre of judicial proceedings. Indeed, a closer look at the careers of government commissioners reveals that these were military men with extensive colonial experience who repeatedly crossed from one side of the Mediterranean to the other throughout the war, thus facilitating the circulation of repressive practices within the Franco-Algerian space. Their professional military and colonial training also help to explain the severity of the sentences they demanded when prosecuting Algerians in military courts. Previously unexplored archives shed light on the operations of wartime military courts and more specifically on the role of these military figures, who had hitherto only been depicted as shadowy enemies by former defendants.

This article explores the living conditions of Algerians in the Saarland region during the Algerian War of Independence. The activities of the French gendarmerie as well as those of the two major Algerian anti-colonial underground organisations – the National Liberation Front and the Algerian National Movement – illustrate the far-reaching impact of the colonial struggle, well beyond the borders of metropolitan France. By taking into account the actions of the local Saar police vis-à-vis Algerian residents, the author of this article reveals the broad significance and persistence of a “colonial mindset”, this time in a German context. This article thus nuances the dominant image of Saarland as a safe zone of relocation for Algerians during the War of Independence.

Drawing on French diplomatic archives, contemporary Burmese press publications and a number of interviews, this article highlights how France sought to prevent independent Burma from publicly addressing its foreign policy in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. It first reveals the existence of Burmese sympathies, particularly among socialist and student circles, for the Algerian nationalist movement. It then describes how the French intelligence services enacted surveillance measures to monitor Algerian envoys during their visits to Burma. Finally, this article explores how France attempted to deter successive Burmese governments from recognising the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, which would have entailed a loss of French diplomatic influence at the United Nations.

By arguing that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) deliberately targeted veterans to punish them for having fought alongside the British during the First World War, traditional historiography has contributed to the general trend of overlooking the involvement of Irish World War I veterans in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. The reality was, however, that hundreds of defectors joined enemy ranks and made decisive contributions to the training and supervision of republican brigades. During the War of Independence, this seasoned minority structured, disciplined and led military units, When the Irish Civil War broke out in 1922, many British veterans helped to raise the new national army of the Irish Free State, thus ensuring the continued existence of these new democratic institutions.

In March 1942, in the aftermath of the English bombing of the Renault factories, French trade unionists founded a humanitarian organisation under the aegis of the Nazi government. Up through 1945, the latter generously funded the pluralist (though largely dominated by the National Populist Rally and the French Popular Party) and collaborationist organisation's operations by means of a fine on “wealthy Jewish families”. Armed with the tools of both working-class traditions and humanitarian activism, the Comité ouvrier de secours immédiat (COSI) relentlessly castigated “Anglo-Saxon crimes”, highlighted German generosity and circumvented the Secours national (National Emergency Relief) service established by the Vichy Regime. In this article, we argue that the COSI, far from merely offering practical assistance and relief to the growing victims of the Allies' raids, was also a major site of syndicalist corruption scarcely touched by previous purges.

Since the 1990s and the first studies on the history of sport and women, it was assumed that sport and feminist movements were diametrically at odds with each other, without truly questioning the nature or reality of this impermeability. In this article, Alice Milliat, the leader of French and international women's sport from the 1910s to the 1930s, is used as an example to rethink the relationship between these two spheres of activity, which did in fact intersect and overlap during the Interwar period. Aligned with the moderate suffragist Jane Misme, Alice Milliat campaigned for gender equality through sport thanks to a strong media presence, the application of feminist principles in the organisation of sport federations and the defence of all sports for all women.

The UEFA Champions League is an unparalleled European sport competition due to its immense popularity. Its success dates back to the creation of the European Champion Clubs' Cup, first organized in 1956 by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). Since that time, it has become a Europe-wide media event and even an international must-see through UEFA's co-operation with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). This article explores the relationships between these two international organisations, in particular with regard to the problems they had to solve jointly to ensure the long-term success of this media event starting at the end of the 1960s.

From its rebirth in 1971 to its first participation as a government party during a congress of the Socialist International in 1983, the French Socialist Party has been the leading left-wing party in France at every level of government. The ascent of the Socialist Party took place during the Cold War, at the same time as economic and political globalisation began to accelerate. To understand the metamorphosis of the Socialist Party during this key decade, it is necessary to contextualise it both nationally and globally. This article therefore seeks to analyse how the French Socialist Party perceived and integrated the main international dynamics of the 1970s. It proposes various ways to define the set of representations forming the overall “world vision” of the Party and its production of “mental maps”.