Contenu du sommaire

The National Front's strategies (March 1986 to June 1987), Guy Birenbaum. A detailed study of over one year of political activity of the National Front's beginning with the establishment of its parliamentary group in March 1986. Three main aspects are analysed : 1. the positions taken, oscillating between two discourses of differing content and tone, and adjusting to salient current events ; 2. a certain diversity of National Front deputies, not all Jean-Marie Le Pen's clones ; and finally, 3. the importance of the regional factor, the potential life-saver for a party threatened by the return to the majority electoral System. This is also therefore the stake of complex local relations, in certain areas, with the current majority.

The winter of the railroad strike, Georges Ribeill To understand the originality of the December 1986 French rail strike - the longest conflict in the half-century of existence of the SNCF, the state company - one must remember « railroad society »'s eventful history : the emergence of a collective consciousness at the time of the pre-1914 companies ; the post-1918 state stewardship ; the cultural and occupational splits of the 1960s, up to the disarray of 1986, whose first signs could be seen as early as 1971.

Hitler in the Third Reich : master or servant ? Martin Broszat and the functionalist interpretation of the Nazi regime, Philippe Burrin. Was Hitler merely one piece in a System of power bigger than he ? This question is a topic of basic debate between two branches of the German historical school. The functionalist approach sets Hitler in a field of forces and constraints in the background we find the even wider problem of political voluntarism, and the interpretation of the working of the machinery which led to the « final solution ». The author stresses the interest of the debate, and also the limits of the functionalists' analysis. Behind it, the place of Nazism in German memory and history is at stake.

Reflections on the historization of national-socialism, Saul Friedländer. A debate on how to study the 1933-1945 period has been opened by several German historians. They favor a « historization » of Nazism, which would make it possible to set those years in the continuity of German history. But reconsidering the national-socialist past according to such criteria is misleading ; above ail, it denies the specificity of the Hitlerite plan : deciding in Hannah Arendt's words « who is and who is not to live on our planet ».

Normalizing the past ? Federal Germany and the Jewish problem, Rita Thalmann The history of Germany's relations with her past concerning the Jews and the « final solution » shows several phases. After the 1952 negotiations on « reparations » to be paid by Germany to the victims who had escaped genocide, German-Israeli relations have been ambiguous, despite exchanges of official visits, which started, it is true, only in 1970. In Germany, embarrassed silence vis-à-vis the Jews has been replaced by a kind of reexamination which resembles the end of a taboo. That is how the « Bitburg-effect » must be understood, as well as the German historians' debate on the historiography of the Third Reich, which challenges the singularity of the genocide.

The cultural history of contemporary France. Questions and questioning, Pascal Ory. Although fashionable contemporary cultural history still suffers from conceptual in determinacy « culture » should be defined precisely, and specified vis-à-vis « politics » and « economic ». The author postulates that cultural history is the social history of representations. However, the historian deals more with what is measurable, quantifiable in other words, with forms less than with the very content itself of this representation. No serious cultural history can be conceived without knowledge of the broad outlines of the history of science and communication techniques. The result would be a study of the varieties of logic of experience, presented as relative to each society and conferring meaning to it.