Contenu du sommaire

Modernization cycles in China (1842-1949), Marie-Claire Bergère. Since 1842, China has been going through a series of modernization drives repetitive enough to be called cycles. The first one, ending with the First World War, was marked by the predominant role of the State. It was a modernization from the top, characterized by belated reforms, insufficient to save the Empire. In the second one, during the 1920s, there was a spontaneous modernization which corresponds to the golden age of Chinese capitalism. But the failures at the end of this period were evidence of the inability of Chinese society alone to perform the tasks of modernization. That explains, despite its distrust of the State, why the bourgeoisie did not renounce the advantages of a centralizing order. Since even liberalism needs the State, the third cycle, that of the Kuomintang, could thus be understood as an attempt to set up a non-bureaucratic capitalism under which the integration of the bourgeois elites to the bureaucracy was to be the expression of a national political culture.

American aid to France after the Second World War, Gérard Bossuat. The Marshall plan aid enabled France to emerge from the post-war crisis on the road to integration and European contruction. But it had consequences on the French choices of economic development by accelerating the modernization of its overseas territories, by basing its trade towards the West at the expense of towards Eastern Europe, and by favoring the political weight of the moderates. It weighed on the balance of payments, and above all, more than making France an « assisted » country, it did not totally succeed in bringing it out of its identity crisis of the 40s.

Communist funeral liturgy (1924-1983), Jean-Pierre Bernard Reports in L'Humanité on the deaths and funerals of the major French and international communist leaders from Lenin to Waldeck Rochet are examined. They show an ethic of sacrifice to the cause of the working class, a policy of active memory, and an aesthetic of ritual, all three minutely adjusted by the Party in the service of its cause.

« La Croix » and the brown tide, Alain Fleury. La Croix, one of the main French Catholic publications, had an ambiguous attitude toward the rise of national socialism. Torn between its deep anti-communism and the fears that the anti-Catholic persecution inspired to some of its journalists, the newspaper gave, up to the war an unclear image of Germany, a reflection of its internal contradictions and its fascination/repulsion for the Nazi regime.