Contenu du sommaire

Asia in 1986. The future is no longer what it used to be, Claude Verceil. The diagnosis seemed hopeless. Asia was doomed to overpopulation, hunger, and war. And yet ! Recent developments continent seem to have proved wrong the prophets of doom. Population growth is controlled better ; people are generally able to feed themselves ; economic development is accelerating ; stabilization of political regimes and a beginning of democratization, a reduction of international tensions - all these indicators have moved to green.

The Algerian Communist Party from 1939 to 1943, Charles-Robert Ageron. From 1936, when it was founded, to 1943, when it emerged from underground, the Algerian Communist Party followed faithfully the sinuous instructions of the Third international. It navigated to the best of its ability, from unity of action with the French to the anti-imperialist or anti-fascist struggle. The German-Soviet pact disorganized its action for a while and forced it underground. It then took up again the Leninist slogan of the struggle against imperialism. Not until 1946 did it adopt a nationalist attitude and strongly temper its wish for union with France.

The intellectual elite, the militant avant-garde and the Algerian people, Guy Pervillé. Contemporary Algerian history has seen in recent years a great wealth of research on minority cultural, social or political groups. The most recent research even uses the biographical method, long criticized as « elitist ». Is such rehabilitation of the role of the individual and of organizations compatible with the « populist » interpretation which explains the Algerian revolution by « the creative initiative of the popular masses » ? The masses were above all a stake, claimed by the two rival minority forces : a military vanguard and an intellectual elite.

Peasant weakness in the Algerian natio-nalist movement before 1954, Benjamin Stora. Concentrating on the biographies of 260 members of the pre-1954 Algerian nationalist movement's leadership which he put together in his recent Dictionary, the author shows that from 1936 to 1953 only 5,7 % of the leaders originated from the peasantry. Such facts, quite contrary to the lyrical statements of Franz Fanon, for example, posed a serious problem before and after the 1954 insurrection, since for the rebels the revolution was to be offered to a largely rural population. This shortcoming has undoubtedly been at the root of many of Algeria's problems since independence.

Accusing the intellectuels third-worldism, Claude Liauzu. The debate between proponents and opponents of third worldism, common among French intellectuals, is a stake in the ideological balance of power between the right and the left. To understand better the terms of the debate, one must study how the intellectuals invented third worldism and analyze how their way of appre-hending the poor countries and national revolutions has changed since 1952 when Alfred Sauvy used for the first time the term « third world », a term destined for an astonishing posterity.