Tenue de soirée de rigueur: Incursion chez les warocqué

The Warocqué family, “nouveaux bourgeois”, were characterised by their constant intention to change the world in which they lived. They were thus industrialists and businessmen and political representatives as was appropriate, but also inventors, paternalist, philanthropists and employers. The Warocqués thus present a multitude of facets and possibilities for study. It was necessary to give greater importance to one of them, particularly as everything could be encompassed as family business. It is precisely the evolution and progression of the family in its local, Belgian and even international contexts that is analysed here—family, tradition and dynasty even: inaugurated by Nicolas, it progresses, develops and reaches its apogee with Raoul, who benefited from the power of the name. This social rise was also interpreted on the level of traditions, of family, of prestige or of a way of life. The article aims to study this particular aspect while successively reviewing some ‘chapters’ in the life of this dynasty: the family (taken as it should be in the broad sense, joining the very current concept of ‘network’), its sociability and passions.     

Affamer les prisonniers de guerre: entre mythes et réalités, 1914–54

Since the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners of war must be taken in care by their guardians, in terms of food. Sometimes this food is not good enough and leads to cases of starvation. Considering ideological conditions as well as material and chronological evolutions, this paper tries to explain how the prisoners are very often hostages in hands of their guards and how starvation can be an ideological tool.     

Les échelles de temps sur les marchés financiers

Modern financial modelling massively implements scaling laws to describe market fluctuations, with the use of stochastic processes in stock market price behavior equations. Scaling laws, which already existed as an implicit part of Brownian motion although notperceived at such, habe become increasingly and explicitely important, since the financial markets regulatory authorities have drawn the attention of the banking industry to the risk control issued posed by the ineffective current valuation achieved using the classical Gaussian distribution. The différent elements surrounding this debate are developed based around Mandelbrot's fractal models, which have underlined the main modelling conflicts of the behavior of stock market prices over the last forty years. I demonstrate that the root of the problem of whether scaling laws exist is the more fundemental issue of the nature of market time.     

Sur le terme yóga,le verbe yuj- et quelques-uns de leurs dérivés dans les hymnes védiques

Summary The term yóga must have designed an essential part of the sacrificial cult as known in the gveda: the putting in motion (“Int?tigkeitsetzen”, following Geldner), the launching of a specific activity with the ultimate goal to yoke, to join together or to pair the objects and the entities which match or can match each other or which can be viewed as comparable and even identical according to Vedic archaic speculative thought. Vedic sacrifice is in fact a powerful explicatory device, a set of gestures and of designs condensing a speculative experience. The verb yuj- and its derivates translate thus one of the central themes of the Vedic religion where the poet officiating in the sacrifice has to proclaim the connections and the identifications between the phenomena to be correlated (“yoked, harnessed”). The hippological vocabulary in the gveda as applied to the representation of the speculative practice is less an accidental metaphor than a true and meaningful translation of one of the basic principles this practice.      

Trois revues institutionnelles : Le Journal de l’École polytechnique,les Annales des Mines,les Annales des Ponts et Chaussées

The three journals studied are characterized by their own institutional background, which explains most probably their centenial longevity, and their slow evolution. The Journal de l’École polytechnique is more academic. The two Annales publish scientific, technical and legislative texts. They are a bond between the administration and its engineers. As the bulk of published articles is huge and diversified, it was important to develop an effective system of access to the various articles.     

Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

Réflexions Sur L’écriture Comme Lieu de Savoir Dans les Livres de Philosophie en France Au XVIIe Siècle

This article proposes a discussion on the sources of a history of knowledge by researching institutions, communities and the broader locations where this knowledge has developed. It shows that the textual nature of the sources of a possible knowledge of these places of learning of the past must be one of the objects of the analysis, with the risk of reproducing social fictions created in their own time to serve diverse political agendas. The case studied proposes an analysis of some of the focal points of the intellectual history of the XVII^th century (academies, salons, schools), and thus permits us to question the unequal social structure of these establishments, by reinserting the activity of writing and publication of a philosophical author into the canon of the numerous discourses on philosophy and those places which, during the era under consideration, turned it into something other than a discipline.     

Lacan et les probabilités

Lacan was interested by the treatment of the probabilities, the theory of games and decision, all topics that gave way to an interpretation of Pascal’s calculus of partition and of the famous argument of betting. Starting from a critical examination of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, that Lacan propounds to the philosophers to replace by logical space and time of the theory of game (as a substitute), the psychoanalyst attempts to prove that Pascal is probably the forefather of the theory of game and decision. A number of interpretations of the «geometer of hazard», which will happen in the years 1970, are in debt, perhaps unconsciously, surely in a secrete way, to the farther lacanian interpretation.     

Le médiéviste,le lignage et l'effet de réel

This paper tries to understand how «lineage» became a key-notion by medievalists when dealing with the field of kinship about the medieval aristocracy, although it is quite an unsuitable notion. Beside the role given to medieval kinship by the social and scientific imagination which prevailed when the historical sciences were formed in the XIX^th century, an important part is played by the creation of a discourse on «lineage» in late medieval aristocracy, linked to a redefinition of the modes of reproduction of seigniorial power, a vector of which must be found by means of representation portraying a durable kin-group, especially through the formation and transmission of «family archives». Historians submitted to the reality-effect of documentary bodies, which were transmitted and were but a historical social construction, did not pay enough attention to the genuine meaning of the archivistic structure. They believed they had found the «reality» of a social organization while they had merely perceived its ideational aspect- and thus, they contributed to the social construction of «lineage».