Contenu du sommaire : Le franquisme en Hexagone (1936-années 1950)

The 2022 French translation and subsequent promotion of Pío Moa's work is a curious phenomenon. Previously unknown in France, this polemical author had experienced rapid success in Spain, but was just as quickly called out for his manipulative and often erroneous interpretations of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which largely consist of re-enacting the official propaganda of Franco's regime. This author's theories can serve as a unique vantage point to understand the manipulation of the past. Indeed, European history has become a key target for anti-democratic attacks that often seek to rehabilitate former dictators without respect for international borders. At a time when scientific discourse has been discredited in many fields, this collective contribution analyzes the methods used by such manipulators of history and reflects on the version of history we wish to teach in our society.

This article examines the way in which a former trend in French salons, the game more commonly known as ping-pong or table tennis, suddenly lost its distinctiveness as an activity prized by socialites and was transformed into an ordinary pastime during the Belle Époque. Drawing on press archives and the gift catalogues of Parisian department stores, this study examines the cultural mechanisms by which a fashionable pastime was reinterpreted and downgraded in prestige. The analysis is based on the advertising discourse and the representations offered by the media, retailers, and manufacturers.

This article analyzes the scope of the Critérium des Italiens de France, a cycling competition. From 1933 to 1938, exploiting the popularity of cycling among the French and Italian populations to its advantage, the Italian Cycling Federation organized this major competition reserved for Italians living in France, with the support of L'Auto, a French sports newspaper. This contest was an opportunity to implement a form of cultural diplomacy that tried to reach as many people as possible, running parallel to the more elitist initiatives of the fascist regime. However, reactions to this event show that its political aspects were scarcely understood by antifascist groups and the French public administration, which allows us to put the impact of the initiative into perspective.

During the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, on November 4, 1979, the archival records of the embassy were destroyed, then their pieces were put back together by the Iranians. The story of these archives can serve as an introduction to the tragedy of American-Iranian relations. Though partial and biased, this corpus provides us with a representative sample of the documents that foreign policy historians generally deal with. By reading them, we can also measure the extent to which the American embassy could be considered a “den of spies,” as denounced by the Islamic Republic of Iran to foment the politics of confrontation that have legitimized its existence ever since.

At the turn of the 2020s, the Algerian War returned to the forefront of public debate, with all of its attendant contradictions. While the President of the Republic sought to turn the page on this moment in the country's history by opening up previously classified archives, his administration endeavored to preserve secrecy. General interministerial order 1300 forced the declassification of top-secret documents, while the anti-terrorism law passed on July 30, 2021 imposed further restrictions on archives related to intelligence. This prompted historians, jurists, and archivists to mobilize against the government's invocation of the “reason of State.” On December 22, 2021, amidst much public support, a general derogation was passed by decree that ostensibly aimed to remove restrictions on the legal and judicial archives related to the Algerian War —a full fifteen years ahead of the initially proposed date. As this article maintains, however, this decree was little more than a smokescreen. From the two-fold perspective of examining both the war and its archival materials, this article investigates the impact of three restrictive paragraphs added to the December decree that deal specifically with the protected categories of legal minors, protected intelligence agents, and persons involved in intimate and sexual affairs. This article argues that a new “reason of State” emerged with the December 2021 decree, inverting the paradigm that had prevailed during the Algerian War. While the former had subordinated the rights of individuals to the higher interests of the State and thus sealed off many archival resources, today's policies actually seek to bar archival access on the basis of those same individual rights, thus reproducing the State's logic. With the December 22, 2021 decree, the real violence of the Algerian War is thus repeated in the symbolic violence of State archival control.