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The threat of American military intervention during the Geneva conférence of 1954 and US strategy, 1954, Laurent Césari. US records, especially those of the National Security Council and the State Department, and those of the Quai d'Orsay, make it possible to reconstruct the French-American negotiation simultaneous with the Geneva conference. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu on 8 May 1954, J.F. Dulles offered an American military intervention in Indochina, in accordance with the policy of containment of communism in South-East Asia. But the conditions attached to this proposal, military and diplomatic developments and above all the misunderstandings about the meaning of a joint military action caused the plan to be postponed, thereby revealing the depth of the differences between the French and the Americans. The former wanted to safeguard their Empire, whereas the latter wanted to prepare themselves to replace French influence.

The movie fans'adventure : Positif (1952-1989), Thierry Frémaux. Created in 1952 by a few students from Lyons, the magazine Positif was one of the most vital incarnations of the great wave of demanding and militant film enthusiasm which emerged in the 1950s and was to level off in the 1970s. Often opposed to Cahiers du cinema, the journal defended a cinema of social denunciation and erudite criticism, committed and passionate, which made up a " style " of its own and brought about its success. But this search for a kind of cinematographic purity ended up by isolating Positif, whose audience has declined considerably. The history of a magazine thus becomes material for a cultural history of today's France.

The " Nora-Minc " report. The history of a best seller, Andrée Walliser. Made public in 1978, the Nora-Minc report was a typical instance of the French tradition of administrative reports. Requested by V. Giscard d'Estaing in order to take stock of the computerization of society, at a time of questioning and increasing worries in France, this report met with great success both in the press and in bookstores, thanks to its brilliant writing and reassuring conclusions. In a few months it became a best seller and, because of the ambiguous reactions it caused, a kind of mirror reflecting, in a period of socio-economic change and discourses on modernization, the state of French public opinion in the late 1970s. The report was much commented, but was it really heeded ?