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"In the Summer of 1973, workers occupied the Lip watch and clock factory, sparking a national cause and controversy. The Lip occupation and self-management experience captured the imagination of the Left in France and internationally, as a living example of the spirit of May '68. In Opening the Gates, Donald Reid chronicles the history of this struggle. Beginning with the early stirrings of worker radicalism in 1968, Reid's meticulously researched narrative details the nationally publicised conflict of 1973, the second bankruptcy and occupation of 1976 and the conversion of Lip into a group of cooperatives operating into the 1980s"--

Abstract
Do militants expelled from the Communist Party ever leave it behind? Jorge Semprún was a Communist resister captured and sent to Buchenwald, where he worked in the sui generis Communist organization there. He spent almost two decades in the party, half of those years organizing the Communist underground in Franco's Spain. Expelled in 1964, he became an anti-Communist who held on to what he valued as a Communist at Buchenwald and in the underground. In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Semprún came to see in what he had learned at Buchenwald a harbinger of the European project he was making his own.

Abstract
The Gilets jaunes brought attention to the existence and demands of the popular classes as other than the deplorables of the far right. This essay examines the ideas of an innovative group of historians who interpret the Gilets jaunes as evoking and enacting the unresolved issues of the revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1871 on the nature and practice of democracy in France.

The importance to Jorge Semprún of confronting Holocaust denial in Vichy Syndrome France is not central to analyses that have been done of La Montagne blanche. To detect it, we must do what Semprún never stops asking readers to do: visit the external worlds to which his text directs us and reread his corpus so as to return with new insights and questions to pose to the text at hand. This essay examines La Montagne blanche in light of Semprún's presentation of Jewish characters in Le grand voyage; his adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's Le Vicaire; his critique of the Communist party's belated acknowledgment of the gulag; his relationships to the Holocaust denier and severe critic of the Communists at Buchenwald, Paul Rassinier, and to Nadine Fresco, the most penetrating analyst of Rassinier; and his attention to Holocaust denial when he wrote fiction rooted in historical situations. Holocaust denial is an erasure. La Montagne blanche draws our attention to that erasure in a novel in which the subject is hardly mentioned.

In cooperation with Jean-Pierre Azéma, Frédéric Krivine conceived of the television series, Un village français, as a way to present the lives of a diversity of individuals in particular historical situations during and immediately following the German Occupation of France. This article examines the motivations and choices of collaborators, resisters and fence-sitters, terms used to make sense of and to judge individuals at the time and by viewers today. In line with the recent work of academic historians, the achievement of the series is to encourage the French public to understand and to interpret these concepts in fruitful new ways by rethinking the personal and the political, and their relationship in the lives of individuals during the Occupation and at Liberation.

This essay examines how two French individuals in the third generation
of Holocaust victims/survivors, Christophe Boltanski and Ivan
Jablonka, research and present their grandparents and how they challenge
contemporary memory culture. Their works differ in their ambitions and the
strategies used to achieve them, but both Boltanski and Jablonka take the
most disrespected of historical genres, the history of the author's family, and
reveal its potential in an arena where the duty to remember what was done
to Jews as a group can obscure the complex individuals who were victims.
These forgotten selves and what they reveal about the societies in which they
lived are the subject of Boltanski's and Jablonka's work. Particular attention
is devoted to the Communist parties in Poland and France and the relations
of their grandparents to them.

Dominique Manotti's novels are informed by her experiences before she adopted this pen name and began writing fiction. As an instructor at Vincennes, a union leader and a militant with Les Cahiers de mai, Marie-Noëlle Thibault practised forms of political action aimed at empowering students and workers. She saw the possibilities for social change these promoted lost with the transformation of France during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Though Manotti continues to use methods she learned in Les Cahiers de mai and related projects, she adopted the roman noir to depict the self-reproducing nature of contemporary society which has displaced the world of participatory democracy to which she had devoted herself. Aware of France's troubled recent past, she is less confident than Didier Daeninckx that revelation of it will weaken the powers that be.