Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Over the last two years, Father Desbois' inquiry on “Holocaust by bullets” in Ukraine has had exceptional media coverage in France. In this paper, the main argument is not to criticize Father Desbois' investigation, which brings a lot to the subject in spite of some limitations, but to question the media coverage. Most media – television, radio, newspapers – and even the book Porteur de mémoires have portrayed Father Desbois as a sort of hero dedicated to the duty of memory. He is celebrated for having revealed an allegedly unknown aspect of the Holocaust – the massive extermination of Soviet Jews by German firing squads. Such an heroic view neglects more than sixty years of public debates, judicial procedures and historical research on the crimes perpetrated in the Soviet Union by the Einsatzgruppen and other German units implicated in the « Final solution ». This rhetorical exercise of “discovery” is a worrisome example of a scoop-oriented popularization of history.

The paper examines the production, uses and collection of postal stamps as specific writing objects in Poland at different 20th century crisis periods: in Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944, during the 1980s, in prisons of Soldarnosc activists, and in different cities of the country until 1989. This analysis of those micro-theaters of writing emphasizes the function of those practices and some of its actors such as the scout youth movement in the mobilisation of a resistance memory in contemporary Poland.

Since 1989, it has been easy to think of Cold War Europe in strictly Manichean terms. However, the division of Europe in two was far from absolute as can be seen by examining the history of the commitment of the “spiritual” French and Polish avant-gardes. These two milieux negotiated the “true” face of socialism as well as the limits of Christian commitment to the socialist enterprise for approximately forty years. As for ideas, the men of Esprit were the masters in the eyes of the Polish Catholic intellectual left, especially those associated with the monthly Więź (Link), founded in 1958 with Esprit as its model. Nonetheless, at a practical level, it was the Poles who showed the way for Esprit as of 1956, through the birth and rise of the union Solidarity. The Polish Catholic left reshaped the spirit of the times as well as the events themselves; at each step of the way, their ties with Esprit supported their efforts.

In the eyes of the post-war “free world”, the specificity of Soviet totalitarianism became clear first from the fact that people and ideas were prevented from circulating. However, the model of a hermetically closed frontier, already tested in the USSR in the late 1930s, was difficult to put into practice after 1945 as the flows brought about by the Second World War as well as the habits of the border populations went against this brake on mobility, whether it be at the local, regional or international levels. Based mainly on the Soviet Interior Ministry's archives and emphasizing the decisive step of 1946, this article shows, on one hand, the arsenal of measures taken by the Soviet authorities to close the new western frontier of the USSR, from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea, and on the other hand, the evidence of cross-border links that these same authorities were attempting to eradicate. It was only at the end of the 1940s that the frontier became a tangible reality on the ground and in people's minds and that its transgression was perceived on both sides as an eminently political act.

From the 1950s onwards, the unprecedented development of tourism, especially among working class communities, generated an increasing number of trips to socialist countries. Tourisme et travail, a tourism association connected to the main French communist union (CGT), was part of this through the destinations it offered. It emphasized each destination's ideological dimension while also developing tourist arguments for the general public. Compared to the 1930s, the priorities were reversed. The political objectives had been at the forefront, leading nevertheless to a form of tourism. After the war, there was a trend that kept getting stronger from the 1950s to the 1980s in which ideological elements in these journeys no longer constituted their main and official goal, even for the way the vacationers perceived and appropriated the trips. The ordinariness of these vacation spots thus took the place of their politicization including for an association closely linked to the communist movement. In the end, the production of an enchanted relationship to the socialist world through tourism implied the paradoxical mediation of a commodified relationship.

Fearing that psychoanalysis would be prohibited in Austria under the influence of the Vatican, Sigmund Freud suspended the publication of Moses and Monotheism in 1934. Was it a real threat? The interventions by the Civiltà cattolica, unofficial organ of the Holy See, on the one hand, and by well-known Catholic scientists, such as psychologist Agostino Gemelli or ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt, on the other hand, revealed striking contrasts in how Vatican milieus viewed psychoanalysis. The atheism of its founder and, above all, the excesses of this new discipline in matter of pedagogy were severely criticized. Yet, several Catholic authors praised the contribution of psychoanalysis to a more human psychology and for challenging an outdated ethics based on obligation. For these reasons the Holy Office, which examined Edoardo Weiss?s book Elementi di psicoanalisis, did not officially condemn psychoanalysis. Although voices of opposition towards psychoanalysis were growing within the Vatican, it would seem that they failed to convince the highest church authorities to intervene.

The reunification of the French gendarmerie and police under one ministry as of January 2009 was announced as the necessary and sufficient condition for a better working relationship between these two elements of the national public force. Wager, wish or order? The presuppositions of the postulate are not, in any case, based on the historic study of relations between the players and these forces of order. During the Third Republic, keeping order was accomplished through close collaboration among gendarmes and policemen, in spite of the duality of the institutions they were accountable to, and above all, of a formal, not very elaborate framework. The mutual exchange of professional knowledge and corporative claims are some of the discreet, although structural, effects of these conjunctural relations between military and civil personnel. In some aspects, keeping order in concert leads to a police effect in the gendarmerie and reciprocally a militarization of the police.

Today, tobacco consumption is generally considered an addiction, a dangerous habit many attempt to quit. For a mass-consumption item, this product has faced an unprecedented fall from grace over the past fifty years. After the Second World War, the use of tobacco was more than tolerated; it was commonly accepted and even promoted. French men and women would freely smoke in all places and at all times; public and private areas were blanketed in a haze of smoke. From 1950 to today, the image of tobacco has slid progressively towards the unhealthy, to the point where it has become a suspicious and dangerous habit, soon banned from public areas. Tobacco became a drug after the medical community proved the dangers of its consumption, when lawmakers put in place a legislative arsenal restricting its use, and lastly, when the French changed their perception towards this product that carries strong social and symbolic values.

For French families inter-country adoption is a difficult process, and not just mere sensational episodes in the newspapers. The difficulties French families encounter when they want to adopt children from foreign countries have given rise to a recent report known as the Colombani report (issued in March, 2008) that attempts to facilitate inter-country adoption, a phenomenon dating back to the 1970's. For a historiograph to look at inter-country adoption as a matter for study proves essential as, unlike a great number of human and social scientists who have addressed inter-country adoption as a complex social issue, French historiographs have but rarely addressed the phenomenon as such. And yet there are many actors intervening in an inter-country adoption procedure: parents wanting to adopt a child, associations through which the adoption will be made, the governments concerned, and international organizations whose approaches may or may not be complementary with those of the other actors, and may sometimes even conflict with them. Studying those different approaches, forever interacting and changing, is a key way to form a historical picture of inter-country adoption in France.

Unesco, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2005, appears to have been in decline for many years. It no longer appears as an international leader in the cultural, educational and scientific fields. This failure is caused by its administrative red tape and opacity, the incoherence of its budgetary choices, and above all by its lack of independence from the main countries that finance it. Nevertheless, there have been significant new developments which might help the institution regain its role on the international arena. The US re-joined Unesco in 2002, and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was negotiated and signed within this organization, and entered into force in March 2007. This suggests a possible revival of the role of this organization. Unesco managed to impose itself for the elaboration of this convention, against other institutions such as the WTO. It constitutes a successful attempt to restore to Unesco fields of activity which used to belong to it but which it has tended to lose over the last decades.

Breton socialists gather every year in Beg-an-Fry (Finistère) in a place which has embodied resistance to the occupying forces since the end of the Second World War. This ritual, the only one in Brittany, aims at honoring the memory of François Mitterrand in a region that has been dominated by Rocard's followers for a long time. How did the construction of this remembrance place on the very site where François Mitterrand landed from England in February 1944 occur? He contributed to it himself by his visits and comments in the press and in his writings. He thus produced the “material” for a future posthumous worship. This memorial capture, which put Beg-an-Fry into “Mitterrandia”, has been taken up by the socialist party. But which memory are we talking about? That of the Resistance fighter, the party leader or that of the president of the Republic? It is the issue of the relationship among history, memory and politics which is thus raised.

Evaluation has been the leitmotif of discourse on higher education and research for ten years in France and even longer elsewhere. Global indicators ranking universities, scientific productivity, and scholars themselves are brandished recklessly and thoughtlessly without taking into account where they come from nor their reliability. In order to reach a more balanced diagnosis and avoid intellectual fashion, this contribution, after detailing the present system's failures, proposes a critical analysis of the new proposed procedures. It offers some concrete proposals specifically adapted to history, the discipline at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences and one that has some analogies with other cumulative experimental sciences. This makes it possible to envisage a wider application.