Contenu du sommaire : L'histoire des armées à l'épreuve des archives

A great deal of work remains to be done to historicize the formation and evolution of armies in the Sahel whilst focusing on the experiences of these men in uniform. Hoping to stimulate further research, the overview we present in this article seeks to build bridges between both the institutional dimension and the personal aspects of everyday life when studying the history of the military in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger after 1960. This article presents a variety of sources that shed light on the issues at stake during this period, and examines the imbalance caused by the ease of access to French archives as opposed to African archives. The challenge is to achieve this combination with an extremely sparse documentation which is, in the current political context, embedded in very active spheres of memory.

Using the French Navy as an example, this article looks at two problems. Firstly, it examines the difficulties historians must face when working on French nuclear deterrence, as a result of the different laws regulating and restraining access to military archives (the 2004 Heritage Code, the 2020 General Interministry Instruction [IGI 1300], the 2021 Prevention of Terrorism and Information Act, etc.). In this context, it is crucial for historians to find alternative sources, such as memoirs penned by senior officers, as well as speeches and oral testimonies given by naval officers and submariners. Secondly, we challenge a historiographical assumption about the weakness of French strategic naval thinking from the 1960s until 1976.

Based on a case study of required military service being challenged by revolutionary organizations after 1968, this article looks at the different possible interpretations of the archives of and about the military. It favors going “against the grain” with regard to the intentions of those who produced such documents. Starting with the official discourse on the social melting pot of military service that was readily accepted, this article shows that conscription, far from being the instrument of a perfect amalgamation of young French men, was in fact a symbol of inequality —a reality that was well understand by those who mobilized against conscription. Finally, recalling that the powerful similarity between social and educational profiles determines the position of soldiers in the barracks, this article highlights that class relations reinforce the difficulties of activism under the flag and questions the possibility of social decompartmentalization.

The Lebanese Army's archives are not open to researchers, but they surface in other settings: in the private collections of retired officers and, more broadly, in the military's written and oral testimonies. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted among veterans, this article reexamines the history of the Lebanese Army during the civil war (1975–1990) by bringing servicemen into conversation with military archives. The absence of documents, their lacunae, and their selective conservation by generals offer insights into the daily workings of the military institution in the mids of conflict. Woven together, these fragments challenge the dominant narrative of an army paralyzed by political and sectarian tensions, revealing instead its bureaucratic performance, the autonomy of its combat units, and the factors driving their cohesion.

Based on an extensive corpus of judiciary documents produced between 1945 and 1956, this article examines the Czechoslovak Army from the perspective of a social history of everyday life. The research emphasizes how Slovakian military records and tribunal rulings are easily accessible, despite some limitations. Relying on these seemingly bureaucratic documents, its focus is on gendered social relationships and authority after the war. During the Stalinist period, after 1948, there were no major changes to gender relations or to authority figures, relationships that were regularly negotiated between subaltern actors and the military.

193 nuclear tests were carried out in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996 as part of the French Pacific Testing Center (CEP). During this period, some 130,000 military personnel were stationed there. The history of the CEP invites us to reflect on the relationship between the Armed Forces as an institution, including its individual servicemen, and this territory where it operated. Looking back at this history means examining the narratives and recollections of an initiative marked under the seal of secrecy, the echoes and consequences of which are still being felt today in very different ways across various territories. It also raises questions about the documentation used to tell this story, the unequal constraints on access to archives, the potential uses of testimonies, and the synergies between these types of sources.

Can we still write about the history of the Iranian army in the 21st century? Removed from the tumult of a field made inaccessible by diplomatic tensions, the internet abounds with new sources for the historian of contemporary Iran. Massive but not evergreen, these sources require research methods borrowed from OSINT and Carlo Ginzburg's teachings on the value of the clue. This article aims to shed light on these precious sources, and will draw on data from museum websites and news agencies held by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, to understand the evolution of the figure of the military martyr since the 1990s in Iran.