Contenu du sommaire : Le PS, nouvelles approches

Municipal socialism from 1900 to 1939 represents a decisive political experience for the socialists, and yet, it has long remained among the relatively under-researched aspects of French socialism. In the communes they governed, socialist mayors acquired their first experience in political power, an experience that proved more lasting than the exercise of power at the national level. In the daily management of local affairs, socialists revealed themselves to be reformers in their practices as well as in their discourse. They conducted ambitious social programs to transform their communes into islands of socialism, which sometimes lead to close cooperation with the so-called bourgeois institutions, not least the Prefect. Mayors accepted and practiced reformism every day even though the official party doctrine prohibited it. Therefore they distanced themselves from a party which doctrine no longer corresponded to their daily political practice. With their clientèle networks and a political legitimacy extending beyond the confines of their political party, the socialist mayors displayed an independence verging at times on disobedience towards their own political party which desperately needed them for its own electoral and financial survival.

In the aftermath of April 21, 2002, the “notabilization” of the Socialist party was denounced in explanation of Lionel Jospin's defeat and the absence of any popular mobilization around his name. The process began in fact during the Fourth Republic, leaving still today the degraded image of a “party of notables of the Third Force”. Yet the PS-SFIO still and always intended to be a party of revolution and class conflict. But in spite of working class reflexes in the choice of its candidates, it was no longer sociologically the generic representative of the working class. Thanks to their local implantation and ruralization, its parliamentarians and general counselors became notables, aging personnel and hostile to feminization. Their professionalization was accentuated by the practice of holding several concurrent mandates and their ability to forge alliances of the Third Force in the field while it had proved unsuccessful in Parliament. Balking at leading the Federation of Socialist Deputies for the French Mayors' Association, the elected officials and their growing autonomy put into question their integration into the party apparatus and valorized the defense of the general interest to the detriment of party spirit. Faced with the erosion of its militant rank and file and its voters, but strengthened by its local notables, the PS-SFIO had to accept seeing the myth of a “working class party” disintegrate.

Socialist party historiography emphasizes the party's organizational weakness that it links to the adoption of the Amiens Charter in 1906. While Northern Europe's social-democrat parties forged organic relations with trade unions, cooperatives and mutual companies, the hectic history of the French worker movement is thought to have deprived the French party of privileged partners by putting it in competition with trade unionism, this “other socialism”. Yet the permanence of this party and its ability to bounce back, in spite of several major crises over a century (1920, 1945, 1969, for example), suggest that it has real links with the society. This record has led to reconsidering these links, through the networks and milieus supporting the socialists and that enabled successful renewals. And thus to reconsider the supple and evolving links with the working class movement, secular networks and associations, not to mention that of the elected officials.

The article deals with the political role of the general secretary then, from 1969, of the first secretary, within the Socialist party. After the 1905 unity and the re-forming of the SFIO following the 1920 Tours Conference, the general secretary appears as the second element in a dyarchial management method. The personalities who exert moral authority have the upper hand on the general secretaries: Jean Jaurès over Louis Dubreuilh, Léon Blum over Paul Faure. On the eve of 1940, this dual management shatters with the war question. The leadership is from now on exerted by a single man, Guy Mollet. The authority which he has at his disposal results essentially from a political agreement on his main values. It also shows the SFIO adaptation to the parliamentary logic. Finally, the conclusion underlines the operating change the Socialist party went through after the introduction, in 1962, of the direct universal suffrage for the election of the president of the Republic. The party became a machine to select candidates.

The Socialist party, founded in 1971, was born in a context in which demands for political renewal and social change were strong. The Socialist party was definitely very different from the SFIO whose heir it is in part: it gathered a variety of currents and won many members from the new middle classes, left-wing Christians, CFDT militants and associations. It took up the aspiration of “changing life”, the idea of self-management, and certain feminist and ecological claims, and thus contributed to legitimizing them. However, this political development was subordinated to its conquering strategy of a new electorate. It did not challenge the bases of the socialist project. It did not make the Socialist party take into account questions on parties, the role of politics and the place of social questions, and the finalities of a transformation of society.

This article analyzes the relation to advertising and secrecy in the definition of political identities using the socialist example. This political family has often put forward its belief in a collectively developed rational politics and an ability to articulate itself clearly, without shame or mystification. From its inception, the party institution had to conserve discretion in working out its doctrine and then to accept irrational elements in its members' attitudes. If “being socialist” is both being integrated in party features (culture, tradition, life form, reflexes) and putting forward one's difference (personality, character, etc.), this discrepancy from the ideal of reason seems even stronger since the early 1980s, as private life is interfering more and more in the public debate.

Though they have different traditions concerning party politics and internal democracy, both the French Socialist party and the British Labour party undertook similar reforms at the beginning of the 1990s. Aiming at modernizing and democratizing the political parties, these changes have permitted the introduction of the One Member One Vote principle for the selection of leaders, a better representation of women at a national level, and the introduction of deliberation processes in the development of policies. However, the comparison shows that all of these measures have not necessarily succeeded in reshaping the internal power equilibrium in favour of the grassroots party members. Yet, these reforms have taken different meanings according to the national polity, the way political leaders have play their role within these structures, and the difference in the notion of political representation their leaders have.

The history of denunciation in France during World War 2 is based more on beliefs and representations than on knowledge. The subject seems controversial and difficult to tackle on a scientific level. Using the incoming mail registers of the Commissariat général aux Questions juives (CGQJ), kept up to date from January 1942 to August 1944, and on the nine thousand name files put together by the head of the Cabinet, we tried to characterize and estimate the particular phenomenon of anti-Semite denunciation during the Occupation. Implicating mostly non-anonymous men, it assumes political and “ideological” characteristics far more marked than the other cases of denunciation. Indeed, it is in line with the tradition of French anti-Semitism, which is used since Édouard Drumont to denounce “Jewish influence” in the press and specialised headquarters. If the phenomenon was quite substantial (a low estimate of twenty thousand letters were registered by the services of the CGQJ), only a minority of letters had direct criminal consequences. In the majority of the cases, the denunciation simply went together with the process of persecution.

In May 1944, on Stalin's orders, the Tatars of Crimea were collectively deported to central Asia or Siberia. To deal with this event, historiography uses the concept of “ethnocide”, according to a memory perspective that often does not take into account the past reality. This article aims at subjecting the use of this term to historical criticism. It is a question of studying the deportation of the peninsular Tatars, their life in special settlement colonies and the process of “de-Tatarization” of Crimea. Based on varied sources, this analysis deconstructs the mechanisms of a deportation raid and the forms of stigmatization of the exiled Tatar community. It also shows by default how the Soviet society thought itself at the end of the World War 2.

This article analyses the transformations of the repressive practices of the Czechoslovak secret police (Státní Bezpecnost) between 1946 and 1968. This period is often described as a moment of progressive liberalization leading to the Prague Spring. Indeed, the repression became less tough and less visible, even though the secret police's activity kept growing, particularly with the multiplication of the so-called “prophylactic measures”. These measures allowed to close a file without a trial, but with administrative sanctions. However their main significance lied in the political meetings they implied. In those, the representatives of the authorities appeared on stage and revealed the “crimes” in front of a large audience, proving therefore omniscience, clemency and magnanimity. These meetings followed a strictly codified pattern, and constituted a political ritual staging the union of the authorities and the people in a moment of popular and therefore legitimized justice. These measures implied a collaboration between the secret police and the social and economic organizations (trade unions, firms…), enlarging the range of the social activities that could be policed.

A man of letters, Pierre Brisson, took over Le Figaro in 1934, compromised by François Coty's fascist sympathies. He imposed a team of writers who brought back the newspaper's dignity and then tried to keep its publication going, in Lyon, between 1940 and 1942. When Vichy censorship became more pressing, Brisson thought of scuttling Le Figaro and maintaining the publication of its literary pages only: two issues of the Figaro littéraire came out in November 1942. At the Liberation, assisted by Maurice Noël, Pierre Brisson relaunched a literary weekly, sold separately from the daily and put out by an autonomous editorial staff. The Figaro littéraire was created in April 1946 in response to the Communist party takeover of many cultural newspapers and to defend the theory of art for art's sake in opposition to the proclaimed engagement of the intellectuals. But how can one respond when refusing to participate in the battle? Or how to oppose without committing oneself? This was the problem the weekly faced in the first years of its existence and of the cold war. It put in place avoidance strategies (defense of writers from socialist countries, debates on the processes of purification) before finding its heroes (Koestler, Kravchenko, Rousset or Rougement) and entering a strategy of counter engagement.

In July 1983, a ten-year old American girl, Samantha Smith, is invited to the Soviet Union by Yuri Andropov himself. After reading her worried letter on the future of the planet, the Soviet chairman invites her to see by herself that the USSR does not want to start any nuclear war. The whole operation is widely covered by the soviet media which do their best to keep the memory of the event alive, especially after the tragic death of the American girl in 1985. By inviting Samantha to be the first representative of the “childhood diplomacy” policy, the soviet power has in mind complex objectives which go beyond a simple propaganda operation for foreign countries. The goal is also, and maybe above all, to help reform an anti-American propaganda machine which has become too inefficient, especially with the youth. The operation is quiet successful, but the chairman's sickness, and more importantly, the tragic events of September 1983 which bring the two superpowers to the edge of the nuclear abyss, prevent Moscow from exploiting fully this operation. However, the memory of Samantha's visit still remains alive today and for some contributes to the communist regime's nostalgia.

Polls conducted in the United States of the most admired American of the past half-century show the Reverend Billy Graham to rank consistently near the top. In the postwar era until the present, no clergyman has come close to rivaling the influence of this Southern Baptist revivalist in a predominantly Protestant society that has valued claims of a personal relationship to the Savior. Yet Graham himself, nominally remained a Democrat, had enjoyed a personal relationship with two American Presidents in particular. Both of them are Republicans; both may rank in polls conducted among historians as the worst occupants of the White House in that same era: Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush. The analyse of Reverend Graham's political judgments, values and practices can therefore contribute to the study of the role of religion in American public life, and complicate the picture of a firm division between church and state in the past five decades.

Decolonization has been studied and taught for a longtime as if it were a historical phenomenon inscribed in a progressive and linear current of the evolution of humanity: it was first, intrinsically, the march of the colonized towards independence and nationality. But many were the chronological and geographical hazards that contradicted this optimism and disavowed the “young nation” concept. And the arrival in strength of the term “postcolonial” weakens it even more.