Former le citoyen de la république naissante retour sur une controverse aux origines de l’école républicaine

This paper looks at the original conflicting approach of the republican school, understood as a traning ground for citizenship. The separation between those who wish to develop a truly democratic school, and those who do not see in this objective a political priority for the emerging republic, embodies the most profound debate of this moment of political foundation of the Republican school. Behind the two visions of the Republican school (education vs instruction), two visions of Republican society are opposed. Further, in the controversy surrounding the nature of the school an opposition, later amplified, emerges between social Republicans and liberal Republicans     

“Jérémie rejoint Guedalias: deux récits,combien de fabulae?”1

Après le récit de la chute de Jérusalem devant l’armée de Nabuchodonosor, le lecteur du livre de Jérémie découvre aux chapitres 39 et 40 deux récits dans lesquels Nebouzaradân libère Jérémie et lui permet de rejoindre Guedalias; le prophète choisit alors de demeurer au milieu du peuple. La lecture suivie de ces deux récits présente une solution de continuité narrative. Même si cela interdit certaines lectures synchroniques, la remise en cause d’une hypothèse implicite sur la linéarité de la fabula permet de penser l’effet du texte en sa forme finale sur son lecteur. Contrairement aux romans classiques du XIXe siècle, on peut découvrir ici un effet similaire au Verfremdungseffekt du théâtre de Bertolt Brecht.     

Le récit de Rousseau comme épreuve de la liberté de conscience

It is known that, according to Rousseau, the voice of conscience speaks instantaneously, and immediately ratifies the good that reason presents to it. The ferocious corruption that strengthens the progress of knowledge, the tumult of conversations or spectacles, however, prevent modern man from listening to his conscience, at the moment when society requires its engagement: the actuality of corrupted relations that enclose the individual gains ground against the presence of moral imperatives in his heart. Therefore Rousseau’s moral philosophy cannot dispense with a theory of memory: the latter permits thedictamen of the conscience to be disengaged from the transitory passions that subject us to contemporaries; it disengages the horizon of an authentic freedom and a responsibility that creates the person’s permanence, in regard to the soul’s immortality. In sum, we show here that in Rousseau’s eyes, reform is accomplished in a conversion narrative.     

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».     

Diversité des réactions réformées à la révocation

Starting from the analysis of the reactions of the Protestant groups to the Fontainebleau edict, this paper examines the development of two main concepts that are at the origin of political modernity, i.e. the distinction between religious and political domains on the one hand, and the popular sovereignty on the other. These two concepts emerged separately as a result of crossed and apparently paradoxal thoughts, whose coherence is to be sought in the anthropological positions underlying them. Therefore the study of the theological debates in the XVII^th century is a way by which the modern political concepts arose.     

Les cercles croissants de la désidentification psycho-et sociogenèse de la haine réflexions sur le Rwanda

Sans résumé Ce texte, rédigé en anglais en octobre 1997, a été traduit ici en fran?ais par Michèle Garlati, avec le soutien financier de l'Académie royale néerlandaise des sciences. Une version préliminaire est parue dansTheory, Culture and Society, vol. XIV, 2 mai 1997, p. 105–122.     

De la controverse aux règles de la méthode de discussion : La métamorphose Pascalienne de la dispute sur le vide

Pascal’s Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (1647) outlines a physical demonstration that aims to put to an end controversies between plenists and vacuists. The traditional form of the dispute with which Pascal wanted to break, however, finds itself reactivated by Étienne Noël, who takes up again the plenist objections which the Expériences nouvelles only consider as possible the better to refute them. Pascal’s letters Au très révérend père Noël and À Monsieur Le Pailleur on the contrary permit one to define a field of disputation different from the one which Noël perpetuates. Pascal subordinates the dispute to the recognition of common epistemological principles: the antithetical discussion about the vacuum should be governed by methodological criteria accepted by all. In contrast with the model of the learned dispute, Pascal thus defines a radically new model: the scientific dispute.     

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.     

La révolution scientifique les révolutions et l'histoire des sciences

In the paper Ernest Coumet presented at the conference on Koyré (Paris, 1986), he suggested that the term «scientific revolution» does not denote for Koyré an historical event, but an idealtype, in Weber's sense. First, the author discusses this thesis and presents the arguments Coumet advances to support it. In the second part of his paper, he criticises the use of the notion of revolution in the history of science. In particular, he argues against the distinction between scientific theories and a «scientific thinking», which would be influencedby the «philosophical thinking» and whose changes would produce a revolution.