The Podcast Centre

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, art historian, professor of art history at Sciences Po, President of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, exhibition curator and author, invites us into the intimacy of her research, from the discovery of a notebook of General Leclerc's Second Armored Division, which belonged to her father, to the present day. Her research, marked by the question of art in times of conflict, explores in particular representations of war and power.

Her latest books:

- L’art de la défaite (1940-1944), ed. Seuils, 2010

- Pour en finir avec la nature morte, ed. Gallimard, 2020

- Le lion de Rosa (Bonheur), ed. Gallimard, 2024  

Source: 

M'hamed Oualdi, historian of the Maghreb and leader of the ERC Slave Voices project, of which the Centre d'histoire is a partner, recounts the discovery of a letter from a slave to his master, written in Arabic (18th century, Tunis), and how it led him to reconsider the way he did history, particularly by considering sources in Arabic. His work sheds light on a different history of slavery.

His latest works include:

- L'esclavage dans les mondes musulmans: Des premières traites  aux traumatismes, ed. Amsterdam, 2024

- Un esclave entre deux empires: Une histoire transimpériale du Maghreb, ed. du Seuil, 2023

- Esclaves et maîtres: Les Mamelouks des Beys de Tunis du xviie siècle aux années 1880, éd. Sorbonne, 2011

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, a leading figure in political and cultural history at Sciences Po, is one of the pioneers of media history. He looks back on the major discoveries that have shaped his career as a historian. Discover how chance led him to the 10,000 unpublished pages of the notebooks of François de Wendel, an important figure of the Great War period and symbol of the “two hundred families”, a discovery that gave rise to an essential biography illustrating the relationship between money and power.

Through a narrative of intimate memories, Jean-Noël Jeanneney shares a life of encounters and readings, and pays tribute to the profession of historian that he practises with passion.

 François de Wendel. L'argent et le pouvoir, Biblis, CNRS éditions, 2019, 672 p.

Léa Delmaire, PhD in history and specialist in the history of health care in Turkey, explores the political and social issues surrounding tuberculosis after the Second World War. She analyzes how Turkey positioned itself as a modern country, capable of combating this disease, then considered one of the main causes of global mortality.
Faced with limited access to archives in Turkey, Léa Delmaire focuses on a corpus of WHO photos, notably depicting nurse investigators, symbols of the fight against tuberculosis and of Turkish modernity...

Source

In the course of her research, Claire Andrieu (professor emeritus at the Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po) came across a real treasure trove in Washington: a wall of shelves measuring 6 by 6 meters, containing the individual files of “Helpers” from most European countries.... And so begins a veritable comparative history of their behavior towards these aviators who fell from the sky.

Claire Andrieu, Tombés du ciel. Le sort des pilotes abattus en Europe, 1939-1945, Ed. Tallandier / Ministère des Armées, 2021

About the design and production of maps and diagrams in the book

As Giacomo Parrinello, a specialist in environmental history at the Centre d'Histoire, and his colleague Santagio Gorostiza investigate the reasons for the degradation and subsidence of the deltas of European rivers such as the Po and the Rhone, a few lines in an Excel spreadsheet catch their eye and take them to the other side of the Mediterranean ...

• Santiago Gorostiza, Giacomo Parrinello, Daniel Aguettaz-Vilchez, David Sauri, “Where Have all the Sediments Gone? Reservoir Silting and Sedimentary Justice in the Lower Ebro River.” Political Geography, 107, 102975, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102975
• Santiago Gorostiza, Giacomo Parrinello, Daniel Aguettaz-Vilchez, “’Liquid Assets’: Coastal Development, Regional Parks, and the Protection of Mediterranean Deltas”, Coastal Studies and Society, 3, 4 (2024), 181-202. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349817241282720
• Giacomo Parrinello, Fault Lines. Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy, 2015
  
   

In this second edition of the podcast “Dans l'atelier des historiens”, Emmanuelle Loyer, professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po and author of a highly acclaimed biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, talks about her encounter with carton 212 in the Bibliothèque nationale's manuscript department.

Source 

The source is taken from the file “Changement de nom”, Fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss, Départements des manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale, NAF 28 150, box 210. Here are a few excerpts from this file, justifying the request for a change of name, which dates back to 1960:

“Finally, I add that all my literary and scientific works, that is, five books (including one, “Tristes tropiques”, translated into nine languages) and 150 articles, have been published under the name LEVI-STRAUSS, which I believe I can say, without too much presumption, has done no harm to the influence of French science and thought in the world.
However, my request is not only, nor even mainly, inspired by self-love, filial piety and loyalty to the memory of my ancestors. The reasons it alleges are old enough and sufficiently solid for us to be surprised that it was not introduced earlier, either by my father or by me. The reason is that, until recently, the Administration was quite tolerant and accepted the use of pseudonyms in official documents such as passports and identity cards. Today, this is no longer the case, and the fact that I am known by a name other than my legal name raises inextricable difficulties, which I have already tried to resolve; (...) Finally, the welcome that the learned world has given to my work, published under a name to which certain theories and discoveries are now linked, confers on this name a public existence independent of the bearer. The name Lévi-Strauss has become an integral part of the scientific discipline to which I have devoted my life, and even if I had to, I would no longer be free to do without it [...]. The foreign-sounding Strauss name could provide a second argument against my request. I would point out that this name was adopted by my great-great-grandfather Loeb Israël, born in Strasbourg on January 22, 1754, who took the name Léon Strauss before the end of the 18th century, declaring his sons Maurice and Isaac, born in 1801 and 1806, as Strauss. A name borne for almost two centuries by a family of old Alsatian stock seems to belong to the national onomastic heritage”.

Read the description of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Paris office (PDF, 449 Ko)

Further information

• Emmanuelle Loyer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Flammarion, 2015
• Jean-Claude Monod (dir.), Dictionnaire Lévi-Strauss, Paris, "Bouquins", 2022
•  Nicole Lapierre, Changer de nom, Paris, Stock, 1995
  
   

In the course of their investigations and research, historians may come across a particular source that irrevocably marks a 'before' and an 'after'. Anatole Le Bras tells us how the discovery of a document in the Departmental Archives of Quimper led him to work on the social history of psychiatry.

Source

A few years ago, the Archives départementales du Finistère digitized Paul Taesch's memoirs and put them online ... (Archives départementales du Finistère, 7 H dépôt, Q 181).

Further information

• Anatole Le Bras, Un enfant à l'asile. Vie de Paul Taesch (1874-1914), préface de Philippe Artières, CNRS Editions, 2018.
• Adèle Barrandon, "La parenthèse médico-pédagogique : une tentative éphémère d'assistance de l'enfant aliéné à la fin du XIXe siècle", Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle, n° 58, 2019/1, p. 229-248.