Contenu du sommaire

Green revolutions in the French coun-tryside (1955-1985), André Fel. Since 1955, the French countryside has undergone great changes. Despite peasant persistence, there has been a real agricultural revolution : mechanization, growth of productiviy, innovations brought by the food industries. The spread of technical progress, stimulated by innovative farmers has been organized by the administration and reinforced by industry. But the modernization movement is divided. Some criticize productivism and its consequences, overproduction. These differences have accompanied the fashion which brought urbanites to the country, developing rural tourism and « rurbanization ». All these upheavals, however, have not changed fundamentally a century-old trend in the French countryside the end resuit is still depopulation.

The Parc de la Villette, between Thélème and Disneyland, Danièle Voldman The plan to equip the eastern part of Paris with a big park has since 1981 become a more ambitious scheme : to invent the urban garden of the 21st century. Hundreds of architects and landscap specialists wor-ked on this adventure. But it is just as difficult to plan urban development as to plan the needs of the population of the post-industrial age. Should city dwellers get fresh air or games ? How does one design an amusement park in the French tradition without making a pale copy of its far-off American model ? Will La Villette become a new Disneyland ?

Pedestrians of Babel and of the City Radiant. Young intellectuals of the 1930s and the city, Pascal Balmand. When urban residence became the rule in France in the 1930s, the young intellectual generation started to ask questions. It denounced a civilization crisis, held the city responsible for moral decadence, as the place of a serious threat to the balance and integrity of the human being as well as that of artifice. In total disagreement with the « modern » architectural movement, the young intellectuals of the 1930s were closer to the movement of « culturalist » urbanism, represented in France by Gaston Bardet. But just as some 18th century critics of the city, they also conceived of it as a promise of everything possible. Thus, between those nostalgic for a return to the land and the visionaries of the futurist city, the young personalist generation anticipated, in a way, the debates of the post-industrial age.

The Bantus, Jean-Pierre Chrétien The « Bantu » model which serves to designate the black populations of austral Africa was a pure creation, first of linguistics and German philology, then of the race science of the colonial era, and finally of contemporary African ethno-philosophy. Created from the outside, it belongs more to the grand Western racial theories than to African reality.

The recruitment of Finance Inspectors from 1892 to 1946, Nathalie Carré de Malherg. The French Inspection des Finances corps is often presented as a private hunting ground of the Paris upper bourgeoisie, and a pure product of the Ecole libre des sciences politiques. The reality was far more complex. The Inspection archives and particularly the files of candidates for the competitive entrance examination allow for a more subtle profile of the Finance Inspector. A careful study of the sociological, geographic and intellectual characteristics of the candidates and of those admitted leads to the conclusion that the competition, studied over half a century, was never a simple reproduction machine for « inheritors ».