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The objective of this study is to assess the effluent treatment system produced by hospitals in the coastal department in Benin, in particular the two major centers, namely the National Hospital and University Center - Hubert Koutoukou Maga (CNHU -HKM) and the University Hospital Center of Mother and Child (CHU-MEL). Analyzes focused mainly on the metallic trace elements. The results showed that the treatment of effluents is not effective in places and that their discharges into surface waters can constitute a source of pollution. The COD and BOD values do not meet the quality standards for wastewater discharge in the Republic of Benin. Trace elements, arsenic and fluoride ions meet the standards for discharge of waste water at the outlet. However, the pollution recorded by this study is very damaging to the receiving environment. From all of the above, the system is ineffective and deserves to be strengthened in order to limit the toxic and infectious risks. The construction of efficient treatment and purification stations in all the University Hospitals of the Littoral department by the authorities is necessary and very urgent in order to reduce the health and environmental risks of these hospital effluents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polo Beyris is a virtually unexplored example of internment under French and German authorities. From 1939 to 1947 the camp of Polo Beyris in Bayonne held successively: Spanish Civil War refugees, French colonial prisoners of war, suspected 'collaborators' and German prisoners of war. Despite having up to 8600 prisoners at one time, the large camp and its numerous satellite work detachments were literally 'forgotten' for decades. Although similar to other camps in its improvised nature, wretched living conditions, lack of food and constant movement of prisoners, Polo Beyris was also unique: located in a dense urban area, within the wartime Occupied Zone and close to the Spanish frontier. Its civil and military administrators were faced with constantly changing, and often chaotic, political and military circumstances. Not a waystation in the Holocaust, Polo Beyris has been lost from the sight of historians. It provides an additional dimension to the complex history of internment in twentieth century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2011 the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, withdrew Louis-Ferdinand Céline from a list of canonical French authors specifically selected for a national celebration of culture. This bold decision was deeply divisive: while many welcomed Mitterrand’s intervention, a number of prominent writers, some of them Jewish, opposed it on the grounds that Céline’s unacceptable political beliefs – expressed in three anti-Semitic pamphlets and his flirtation with Nazism – should not overshadow his literary genius. In the light of this controversy, and of the rise in anti-Semitism following the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015, this paper proposes Céline as a vital case study of the moral parameters a democratic nation should apply to a culturally important figure whose political views are deemed unacceptably reactionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chaotic aftermath of the war in France conceals a complex range of intellectual positions, conditioned by the Épuration, a purge of those who had to one degree or another collaborated with the Nazi Occupier after July 1940, and well as the onset of the Cold War. Armand Petitjean, who had been one of the young hopes of the liberal cultural review, the Nouvelle Revue française ( NRF), before the war, was one such writer to be purged in September 1944. Following the advice of Jean Paulhan, his former mentor at the NRF, he re-joined the army to help mitigate his case. However, embittered by his treatment at the hands of the communist-dominated Writers' Committee, the Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE), he, Paulhan, and others were rapidly mobilized in favour of the anti-communist cause, as the Cold War gathered momentum in 1947. This paper, using unpublished papers in the Petitjean archives - including book-publishing projects and unpublished correspondence with that guru of anti-communism, Arthur Koestler - will offer a case study on what was conceived as the 'New Resistance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]