Contenu du sommaire : La censure aux Etats-Unis.

Following the Robert Bork fiasco in 1987 critics voiced their concern over the increasing « politicization » of the procedure of Supreme Court nominations. As is often the case after the Senate rejects a nomination, the legal community made proposals to take the political out of the procedure and restore the whole event to the dignity which would become the highest court of the land. Since 1939 Supreme Court nominations have become a national political event during which constitutional issues are publicly discussed. The purpose of this article is to show that such proposals could very well lead to violations of the First Amendment and so to acts of censorship of the political debate which would inevitably lead to a constitutional imbalance.

As a result of infringements of First Amendment freedom of expression and association during McCarthyism, the decisions handed down by the Supreme Court in famous cases showed that it failed to counterbalance the two other branches of government. This is an investigation into the composition of the Court and its judicial approaches, as well as into the standards it applied to subversive advocacy and the scope protection it granted to First Amendment freedoms in such a context of crisis. At the same time it emphasizes the fragility of democracies.

This paper tries to explain why the articles concerning slavery and freedom in the first Constitution of Haïti were omitted when the text appeared in the Richmond Enquirer on July 23, 1805. The sources of the editor are not to be blamed. There are two reasons for his deliberate omissions : as a Republican supporter, he downplayed the contradictions of his party (which the missing articles highlighted) ; as a Southerner, he adopted the new consensus imposing silence about slavery. By truncating the original text, he heralded the official censorship that was soon to pervade the South.

Between 1947 and 1956, a sizable number of comic book titles were regarded as questionable reading material by parents, experts and authorities. In response to the phenomenon, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on illustrated magazines in 1954. Although the Subcommittee eventually recommended no federal legislation, it singled out certain comic books as likely scapegoats for juvenile delinquency ; the negative publicity thereby generated forced most publishers to resort to self-censorship to circumvent local bans against comics.

In one shot from The Face on the Bar Room Floor (1914), observance of the proprieties is shown to have stimulated the director's art of composition and staging, and to have served rather than stifled his eroticism : Chaplin's side-stepping leads him to enrich his mise en scène, and to give expression to even more subtle and secret layers of Charlie's libido. Further analysis of a sequence from A Woman of Paris (1923), whose theme and visual motifs echo the scene from The Face, shows découpage and elliptic editing identically spurred by the pressures of (self) censorship.

Scorsese draws a personal portrait of Christ tempted to « get off the cross and live the rest of His life as a normal human being ». The scandal created was not so much due to its « pornographic » content as to the suggestion that Christ might have been tempted to renounce his sacrifice. This paper presents the anti-Temptation campaign as an illustration of the violence that may be generated by blind, noninstitutional, fundamentalist censorship at local (possibly level, and to show how such censorship is primarily a matter of local pressure usually counterbalanced by the power of Federal constitutional authority.