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A phenomenon that crossed over from the United States, hitchhiking appeared in France under the name “auto-stop” at the end of the 1930s and quickly became more than just a cheap way to travel. Born thanks to the democratisation of the automobile, the rise of hitchhiking also attested to growing desires for mobility and freedom that transformed French society during the middle of the 20th century, especially among the youngest generation. But the positive image of the resourceful hitchhiker, though widely popularised, stood in stark contrast to the perceived though sometimes mythical danger of the open road (accidents, criminality, sexual violence). Although proponents of hitchhiking sought to regulate the practice to make it safer, it proved difficult to organise an informal practice, and the image of hitchhiking became increasingly problematic during the 1970s.

While the 1950s are often seen as a period of Keynesian consensus in the United States, especially in the liberal Northeast, a closer examination of New York City politics reveals that welfare fraud became a major political concern for local elected officials during that very decade. Based on a study of legislation, correspondence between elected officials, and newspaper articles, this article looks at the elaboration of welfare fraud as a political issue in postwar New York City. Although it has often been associated with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, the criminalization of poverty was actually well under way at the local level during the postwar years.

Robert Fuzier's drawings of Communists as published in Le Populaire from 1931 to 1940 are one of the best indicators of the “unitary” line which made this daily newspaper, the Socialist Party's main publication at the time, unique. The newspaper's position was constant, despite the ups and downs of contemporary relationships between Socialists and Communists. Until 1934, at a time of confrontation, Robert Fuzier only good-heartedly teased Communists. Once the unity pact of July 1934 was signed, he continued to promoted unity with them. After the German-Soviet pact of August 1939, he did not denounce them. Thus he translated the priority handed down by the newspaper's leaders to fight against fascism, despite certain elements of anti-communist socialist feeling.

In December 1949, a trial was held in Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East, to prosecute the leaders of the Japanese bacteriological programme. In the puppet state of Manchukuo, from 1932 onwards, the Japanese military established a network of scientific establishments where, with a view to developing bacteriological weapons, medical experiments were conducted on humans. The Khabarovsk trial was intended to raise questions that had been evaded by the Tokyo Military Tribunal implemented in 1946. In order to understand how the Soviet Union tried to use the settlement of the Second World War in Asia to its advantage, this article describes the organisation of the Khabarovsk tribunal and the course of the trial, the facts contained in the indictment and their ultimate fate in Tokyo, the doctrinal references, and the nature of the sentences proclaimed.

In Brussels in May 1951, former Resistance fighters and deportees from Nazi camps organized a trial of Soviet concentration camps under the leadership of French intellectual David Rousset. The article focuses on this forgotten event and explores its backdrop, that of a cultural cold war marked by the recent Kravchenko and Rousset cases. It also sheds light on the unique form of trial adopted by the former deportees, who invoked the legacy of the Nuremberg tribunal without, however, having any real legitimacy in terms of international law. Mostly dedicated to the deportees' testimonies, these hearings prefigured the Eichmann trial that would take place in 1961. The article argues that the cultural cold war and the legal limitations of the trial contributed to its historiographical absence.

This article offers a new reading of the transition to peacetime after the Great War and the role former officers were to play in interwar societies. In the heat of combat, when young men who otherwise shared skills and experiences found themselves arbitrarily allied or opposed above the trenches, a chivalric imaginary helped to buoy the hope of less violent, modern warfare in the skies. This fiction has become a long-standing feature of the representations and remembrances of aerial warfare. On the fringes of collective memory, aviators developed and preserved a particular memory of the conflict that oscillated between pacifism and glorification of the war in the skies, and which served the interests of many actors in the aeronautical sector.

Who was Jean Lecanuet? Adopting a biographical approach focused on the former senator and mayor of Rouen, we will attempt to describe centrism and the political “center” in France under the 5th Republic. In this study, the concepts of power and territory will play a key role: Lecanuet's local roots, when combined with his national reputation, made him one of the great political figures of the 20th century. Nonetheless, local centrism in Rouen raises a number of questions: did its electoral strategy, based very precociously on political alliances, reflect the national trend of interparty coalitions? What about the center's autonomy?

Around 1960, about 30,000 divorces were finalized in France; the number reached 100,000 in 1985. During the same time period, the decline in the number of marriages also became a major concern for the Catholic church. These opposing trends in marriages and divorces raised troubling questions for several leaders of the French Catholic Church. At the time, struggling couples were left to their own devices, especially those who were going through a separation or divorce. Canon law simply ignored divorce, whereas remarriage led to sacramental exclusion. This practice of effective banishment from the ecclesial community caused an outcry. Among the few, timid pastoral initiatives that emerged to welcome divorcees and remarried believers into the fold, the work of one bishop stands out: that of Armand Le Bourgeois, bishop of Autun (1966–1987).

This article describes the gradual politicization of lesbianism in the French Mouvement de libération des femmes (Women's Liberation Movement) and the elaboration of a lesbian political subject in France in the 1970s. Working from a two-fold analytical perspective that combines an empirical history of the emergence of lesbian mobilizations and an epistemological critique of second-wave feminism's concept of “women,” it examines the militant history of the theorization of heterosexuality as a political regime. Taking as a starting point Monique Wittig's famous sentence according to which lesbians “are not women,” this article asks the following question: from feminism to lesbianism, from “We, women” to “We, lesbians”, what is the political and social history of the theoretical and epistemological reversal proposed by Monique Wittig?