Ou comment se constitue et se développe un nouveau champ disciplinaire

Abstract

Contemporary History in Europe since 1945 This article sketches the remarkable evolution of the study of contemporary history, in 20th Century Europe, from a disdained sub-discipline conducted on the margins of the academic landscape to one of the most prolific if not hegemonic historiographic fields. Beyond national peculiarities, it seems that one can identify common stages in this evolution in Western Europe. Contemporary national history was at first entrusted to specialized national institutes or institutes affiliated with powerful political families. Then, in the 1970s, contemporary history began winning its titles of academic nobility and integrated itself in the usual networks and institutions in the fields of research and university education. A concomitant evolution to this « banalisation » tends nevertheless to underline, through the figure of the historian-expert, the peculiarity of the relation between contemporary history and its subject. If historians acquired new autonomy, especially in regards to politics, the fact remains that contemporary history lost nothing of its features, which consisted in territorial competition in a field that is the object of all desires and pressures, with the constant, difficult challenge of establishing critical distance.