Nature plays a significant role in the discussion for and against modernism, which got under way from the late eighteenth century onwards. The rationalists of the Enlightenment considered not only human nature, but also the whole uncultivated realm of nature beyond, that of the animals and plants, as wild and dangerous. It should, according to them, be tamed for the benefit of mankind and put to use. Thus they laid the ideological foundations that made possible the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources for the free development of the market and specifically for industrialisation, ie for material and ideological modernisation processes. The Romantics, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of non-material values. In their view the inherent and irretrievable beauty of nature should not be sacrificed on the altar of utilitarianism. A century later the critics of unrestrained economic modernisation expanded on the Romantics' view. They criticised the ‘tumours’ of industrialisation, urbanisation and materialism, advocating greater preservation of the wilderness and, indeed, of agrarian land and the rural way of life. For them, such things were not just symbols of originality, beauty and health, but were also part of the ‘national character’. They were unique treasures, unlike replaceable material interests. Nature, as a source of raw materials, became a multifunctional cultural heritage. ‘Materialism’ and the idea of progress, the central characteristics of modernisation, were challenged by criticism of civilisation and by historicism. Thus the basic cultural and political camps were established, but also the decisive ideological preconditions for the emergence of a nature conservation movement.

Like other cities, Bordeaux discovered the phenomenon of electricity by the end of the nineteenth century and tamed it during the first third of the twentieth century. Here, as elsewhere, one could follow the stages in the diffusion of the uses of electricity. But tackling the history of the electricity industry in Bordeaux means, perhaps more than elsewhere, getting involved with the evolution of the governing bodies which have dominated the process of electrification. Indeed, Bordeaux presents the case, very rare in France of a town which has known several juridical changes in the development of generation and distribution of electricity. From the start, until 1919, the construction of the network and its exploitation were taken care of by private companies. At this date, the Council appropriated the means of production and of distribution of electricity; the authority which was created then remained in existence beyond the general nationalisation of 1946, until 1956, when the city entrusted its electricity supply to the national company Electricité de France (EDF). How can these statutory changes be explained? We shall see that they can primarily be accounted for by shortcomings in the supply, whoever the operator may have been at the time. Indeed, in this field, supply first created demand and thus engendered the first faltering attempts in electricity. But, then, on several occasions, the electric power supply hit financial and technical snags. The change of juridical status then appeared as the solution to the people in charge.

In 1926 the Fascist regime instituted a restrictive shop-licensing system which accounts for the continued prominence of small shopkeepers in Italy today. Retailers' interests were represented on the licensing panels by the Fascist Confederation for Commercial Traders in an apparently genuine grant of corporate authority. The confederation swiftly reconstituted itself after the fall of the regime and retained its power within the post-war licensing structure. This article will analyse the background to the introduction of the system as a way into debates about the relationship between the Fascist state and the petite bourgeoisie.

On 17 January 1936 Winston S. Churchill, the back-bench bête noire of the Conservative Party, wrote to his wife Clemmie from Marrakesh, where he was on holiday, about the frightful international situation. Japan had ruptured the conference on naval aramaments, and Nazi Germany was rearming at break-neck speed. The ‘two predatory military dictatorships’, it seemed to Churchill, were now working together. ‘No wonder’, he said, ‘the Russian bear is quaking for his skin and seeking protectors among the capitalist powers he deserted in the war and sought to destroy at the close of it. What – to quote a famous phrase – “What a fearful concatenation of circumstances”.’2

In comparative Labour history there is a long tradition of adhering to a typology of labour movements which distinguishes south-western European, ‘Latin’ labour movements (France, Spain, Italy) from north-eastern European labour movements (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, east and south-east Europe) and invokes a third category: Anglo-American labour movements. The British Labour Party is usually subsumed under this latter category, whereas the German SPD is regarded as the spiritual leader of the second. Insofar as these comparisons explicitly deal with the time before the First World War, their argument is indeed a strong one. After all, the SPD was the largest socialist party in the world before 1914, at a time when the Labour Party did not even allow individual membership. At least in its organisational strongholds, the SPD resembled a social movement providing for its members almost ‘from cradle to grave’. The Labour Party, by contrast, is often portrayed as a trade union interest group in parliament with no other purpose than electoral representation. Where the Labour Party avoided any ideological commitment before 1914, the SPD had at least theoretically adopted Marxism as its ideological bedrock after 1890.

Little more than a decade after having lost the Second World War, the society of the western part of Germany, the Federal Republic, had changed fundamentally in the eye of the observer. The economic expert Henry C. Wallich was not the only one to speak of the ‘German miracle’. Not only had the previously achieved industrial standards long been regained and surpassed, but also a boom had set in – as in all of Western Europe – which came to an end only in the 1970s. Simultaneously, both economy and society had been modernised in the process of reconstruction. The transition to a new stage of modernity, ‘society in affluence’, was discussed animatedly. The emergence of new leisure lifestyles in particular was considered a mark of present times. However, in current reviews it is often forgotten that the West German society of the 1950s was to a far greater extent determined by continuity with the interwar period and by the consequences of the war and post-war years than a first glance at the spectacular novelties suggests.

Citizens of the Polish People's Republic have a right to enjoy cultural achievements and to participate creatively in the development of their national culture …. The Polish People's Republic is concerned for the all-round development of scholarship, literature, and the arts, and surrounds with particular care the creative intelligentsia and those engaged in scientific, educational, literary and artistic work.

The Constitution of the Polish People's Republic, 1952.

Historical research into the petite bourgeoisie in Belgium did not begin until quite a bit later than it did abroad. On closer inspection, that was no bad thing. Because of the late start by Belgian historians, they were more open-minded and less inclined towards the research into the roots of Fascism which was largely based on pre-war sociological theories. Beginning in 1980, pioneering research was carried out at the Université Libre de Bruxelles – for the most part on the period before the First World War. The research group under the direction of Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk systematically analysed several important series of sources and produced interesting detailed studies. In 1993 Serge Jaumain published a comprehensive study on Belgian retail trade in the period from 1880 to 1914.

When the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party came to power in 1932, Sweden experienced a turning point in its history. For the first time the role of the Social Democratic Party in the construction of the welfare state became significant. Until the end of the 1910s the Social Democrats had concentrated their primary efforts on the problems of trade union recognition and the struggle for parliamentary democracy. After 1920 the Social Democrats became the largest party, but did not gain political power except for a brief interlude. The concept of the ‘Swedish Model’ has often been used in Sweden and abroad to describe the unique development of Swedish society in the twentieth century. However, historians and social scientists have tended to analyse Swedish society without a clear definition of the very concept, the ‘Swedish Model’.

Since the so-called ‘Change’ of 10 November 1989, Bulgarian historiography has been, with its society as a whole, ‘in transition’. That phrase, it should be noted, has acquired what is at best a desultory connotation in the harsh realities of contemporary Bulgaria. Blocked by protracted economic crisis and failed political leadership, the road to reform has been uncertain, its destination obscure. The same situation has held true for practically all of the institutions of Bulgarian life, including the profession of history. Some welcome changes and positive achievements have been so much accompanied by problematic trends as to preclude any definitively favourable prognosis.

Is France racist, as Michel Wieviorka has suggested in a recent book?1 And if so, why? Is France more or less racist than her European neighbours, and is the degree of racism increasing or decreasing? These questions are being hotly debated in the wake of the electoral successes of the National Front, which is seen as a ‘racist’ party by three-quarters of French people old enough to vote.2

Some years ago, Edward Thompson famously scolded historians for their ‘enormous condescension’ towards working people of the past. His message and example struck a responsive chord, and over the past thirty years a lively historiography has rescued these and other ‘invisible’ figures from their former obscurity. However, while many among history's silent masses have thus received their ‘voices’, this has not been the case for that vast and mediocre mass, the middle classes.

It can scarcely be said that François Mitterrand lacked reasons for despondency between September 1994 and May 1995: the oppression of imminent retirement, the ravages of illness, the loss of his dearest friends; the tide of scandals mounting towards the presidency; the disastrous Socialist performance in both the legislative elections of 1993 and the European elections of 1994; the political, intellectual and emotional collapse of the brand of left-wing magnanimity which he had made his own and which had borne him to power; the ingratitude of public opinion, anxious for change. Most of the books devoted to the last months of his ‘reign’ fail to go beyond a fairly mechanical rendering of a feeling of anti-climax. Something of an exception is L'Année des adieux (‘Year of Farewells’),1 a bitter-sweet chronicle of life in the President's entourage by Laura Adler, an adviser to the Elysée; but her comradely offering does little to stem the tide of hostile, regretful or frankly accusatory offerings. It is no coincidence that Jean Montaldo's Mitterrand et les 40 voleurs (‘Mitterrand and the Forty Thieves’),2 has become a long-term best-seller: Montaldo, a former police officer, mercilessly exposes the nexus of scandal and intrigue in the presidential entourage. Or that Thierry Pfister's novel Le Nègre (‘The Negro)3 uses a thinly disguised cast of characters to make a violent attack on the betrayal of socialist ideas, with a bitterness felt also in Daniel Rondeau's Mitterrand et nous (‘Mitterrand and Ourselves’),4 referring to the post-1968 generation which the author claims to represent. Or, again, that it should be the President's most consistently vitriolic radio critic, Philippe Alexandre, who in a tardy attack of pseudo-remorse has undertaken a Plaidoyer impossible pour un vieux président abandonné par les siens (‘Speech in defence of the indefensible, on behalf of an ageing president deserted by his followers’).5 All in all, a display of authorial individuality and ardour, as writers scramble to accomplish the finally rather banal task of presenting the departing President with History's bill for board and lodging.