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Worldwide, subject-matter teachers are commonplace in post-elementary schools. Teachers' specialisation appears as a key characteristic of secondary schools as opposed to the polyvalence of primary school teachers. Historians have already studied the long process of teachers' specialisation, which started, in France as in Prussia (for example), at the beginning of the nineteenth century and developed alongside secondary school modernisation. Those works have usually focused on professional aspects: the structuration of professional groups thanks to the unification of training and recruiting processes, the organisation of teachers within subject-matter associations etc. However, they have not paid much attention to the resistance opposed by other forms of pedagogical organisation, as if polyvalence were were just a backward anomaly, a backward anomaly, doomed to disappear. This paper seeks to shed new light on this question using a comparison between the different forms of post-elementary schooling that existed at the same time in France between the last third of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when the slow growth of post-elementary schooling was mainly due to the success of subaltern institutions. In those institutions, dedicated to technical education, girls' secondary education, or upper-lower classes' education ("primaire supérieur", "secondaire special"), different kinds of polyvalence or bivalence were experienced in the classrooms. At the same time, specialisation was triumphing in classical secondary education. Why, how and to what extent did specialisation eventually impose itself in these different institutions? To address this question, two types of material are used. On the one hand, the question is studied on a national level, analysing both the legislation and the controversies it arouses in pedagogical and professional reviews. On the other hand, these views and theories are confronted with a prosopography of post-elementary school teachers in one department, Eure-et-Loir, which offers several forms of post-elementary institutions. This question is addressed focusing on literary disciplines (philosophy, French, Latin, Greek, modern languages and history and geography). By narrowing the scope, the intellectual and cultural stakes of the various pedagogical organisations that were implemented or advocated may more easily be grasped. The first part of the article examines the most common (though relatively untested) hypothesis: there was just one strategy for those who advocated the promotion of subaltern types of post-elementary schooling as part of a democratisation process, and this strategy was reproducing the model of the elite institution, secondary classical education, including its pedagogical organisation, starting with subject-matter teachers. The chronology of the changes, the content of the debates, as well as a comparative inquiry into teachers' remuneration induces us to discard this hypothesis as insufficient if not irrelevant. For girls' secondary education, a trade-off may be observed between equalisation (of salaries, rights etc.) and pedagogical alignment. For the other institutions, there was no lack of advocates for the specificity of the pedagogy or of the institution; however, specialisation was usually considered a process that could ameliorate the quality of teaching in these institutions without renouncing its specificity. In fact, in the period under study, the louder advocates for less specialised teachers came from secondary classical education itself: the specialisation process as well as the fragmentation of the class schedule had pedagogic inconveniences, abundantly noticed and commented on by subject-matter teachers themselves. In the second part, these critics and the two main alternatives suggested by the teachers are examined. The first is linked with the Progressive Education movement ("Education nouvelle" in French). The École des Roches, a private institution, tested an original organisation that combined the tradition of the humanities with the modern characteristic of "Éducation nouvelle": there was only one teacher for history, geography, French, Latin and Greek. The teacher was thus enabled to practise a pedagogy of interest, as advocated by Ovide Decroly. The second alternative was advocated by some modern language teachers: if modern language teachers could teach French as well as a modern language, this pedagogic organisation could give strong unity to the until then defective "modern" curriculum (without Latin). The third part turns towards the effective organisation of post-elementary schools in Eure-et-Loir. To what extent were these alternative conceptions of pedagogical organisation implemented? The analysis of individual records of teachers suggests several results. First of all, in small institutions – be they classical secondary institutions like "collèges" or modern ones like "écoles primaires supérieures" – specialisation of services was a luxury that most teachers could not afford. Most of the time, they had to teach several subjects, even if they had been trained for just one. However, polyvalence was not used as an opportunity to make connections between the subjects. Class schedules rarely enabled teachers to use polyvalence as a way to teach several subjects to the same pupils. More often, polyvalence was used by the administration as an expedient that some teachers explicitly tried to escape, for example by asking for a move to a bigger institution. This mundane reality of small institutions invites us to pay renewed attention to teacher training and its regulation during the same period. At the end of the nineteenth century, teachers' specialisation had been inextricably linked with the modernisation of universities through the specialisation of the "licence de lettres" in 1880. When this model proved to be partially irrelevant for a significant proportion of post-elementary schools, how did universities react? Were universities fit for something other than training specialised teachers? The answer is yes. The curriculum organisation of the licence opened up several possibilities for training polyvalent teachers. This perspective was still looming at the end of the 1930s. The curricula of the different post-elementary settings analysed in this article shared the same characteristics: they worked as "serial codes" not as "integrated codes", to quote Basil Bernstein. Therefore the specialisation, bivalence or polyvalence of the teachers did not have much influence, in itself, on the degree of integration of the curriculum. From this perspective, specialisation could probably guarantee better teaching of the subject matters. However, polyvalent teachers were better suited to small schools than specialist ones. Considering demographic and geographic constraints, there was a clear trade-off between specialisation of teachers and separation of publics. In small cities, it was necessary either to mix the pupils to specialise the teachers, or to accept some kind of polyvalence to keep different types of students separated; the debate was still open during the 1930s. School massification, coeducation and the baby-boom era rapidly settled the matter for small cities after the Second World War, giving way to an effective specialisation of teachers. But the question remained open, until the end of the 1970s, for rural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all 8 ministers of France in Bucharest between 1880 and 1916, the name of Camille Blondel is the most known. It couldn't be different. The French diplomat succeeded, during his mission in Bucharest, to contribute to a rapprochement between Romania and France at the beginning of XX century. In this paper, we have been looking to surprise aspects of his activity in Romanian Old Kingdom before the outbreak of First World War and after 1914. During the period of Romania's neutrality he had intense activity until May 1916, when he was suddenly replaced. He didn't leave Romania, preferring to stay and withdraw to Iai along with the Romanian administration at the end of 1916. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2001 to 2005 some 1360 experts involved in the MA provided a report for policy makers based on their scientific assessment. Since the publication of MA in 2005, the rarely used concept of "ecosystem service" (ES) was thus promoted to a central position in the analysis and formulation of environmental issues. In France, however, this concept appeared later. Our paper contributes to understanding French indifference regarding the concept of ES before the publication of the MA. Whatever their academic or research status or discipline (ecology, biology, economics...), French scientists were not involved in the MA. Yet, some years before the MA they were highly mobilized in the Global Biodiversity Assessment (1993-1995), the previous international assessment of biodiversity. To explain this lack of interest for the MA and ES concept, our paper analyzes the role of the Ministry of Research and Ministry of Environment and shows a structural cleavage between the world of research on the one hand and the world of politics on the other. In addition, the survey showed that the professional culture of French scientists and their strategic interests do not encourage them to actively invest in international assessments such as MA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1974 "Berg letter" to the petitions « Défendons la recherche » and « Ouvrons la recherche » in 2003, biologists have often alerted -- and been challenged in -- the public arena regarding the risks and stakes of genetic engineering. The paper first compares the scientists' public commitment on GMOs in the 1970's and in recent years. Around 1975, a short-lasting GM controversy arose from the mobilization of young committed biologists. In sharp contrast to this proactive commitment, most of the seven petitions signed by scientists after 1996 were rather reactive and instigated by destructions of GM field trials. These results a re discussed in the wider context of change in the scientists' public commitment since 1968. Among the 3217 signatories of these petitions, a correlation is shown between disciplinary affiliation and public opinion expressed on GM crops. The paper finally shows how the trajectory of the French GM controversy in public arenas has co-evolved with the competition between three epistemic cultures (molecular biology, population biology and farming systems agronomy) in framing GMO risks and biosafety, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the extreme South of Massif Central, the Montagne Noire proves to be more and more attractive for amateur speleologists of original speleothems. This is due both to its geological history, to the specific litholohy of karstic rocks and to an important karstification in relation with profuse precipitations. Pits (Cabrespine) and caves are particularly well developed and lauded for their famous aragonite speleotems. Less known, because less touristic, the Pearls Cave is worthy of note as well: it has been selected to belong to the 18 cavities that could be registered on the World Natural Heritage UNESCO list. Indeed, the abundance and the rare beauty of the cave pearls and other curious morphologies confer to it an exceptional interest. The goal of this paper is to give a glimpse of this subterranean world so strange and magnificent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on some salient issues of urban sustainable development in France with a specific accent on six urban agglomerations: Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse. The reticular nature of these issues and the circuits leading to their realization are analysed with reference to the ways a multiplicity of actors conceive, plan and bring about the construction of cities, rather than through sectoral viewpoints. Thus, urban sustainable development appears within a (locally variable) set of linkages that sets these issues firmly in areas of interrelations and intersections. Based on a large body of documentation and field work (observations and interviews) this approach helps trace the complex relations between discourse and the reality of on-going dynamics, including the implementation of sustainable development urban operations such as mutations in the domain of public action as exemplified by urbanisation. These relations converge in articulating the issues, with urban sustainable development — in the diversity of its usages — becoming a "portmanteau", much like "governance". In this context, technical experts and the "city professionals" can be seen as intermediary representatives: actors/go-betweens who contribute to the development of links and modes of combining practices between usually separate worlds. On this assumption, we consider that nowadays novel professions directly linked with urban areas and environmental issues are emerging at public local level (cities, metropolitan institutions, town-planning agencies, semi-public companies, associations acting as service providers, etc.), in proportion with the development of an urban sustainable development "repertoire" in urban politics. New specific competences and scopes of activities extend and define the field of sustainable development experts. Nevertheless, these competences remain broken up between several kinds of jobs and functions (civil servants and local government officers, project leaders, urban architects, consultants, employees of associations, etc.). Indeed, the limits of this professionalization process are significant of the success of urban sustainable development itself, which can be interpreted as a malleable concept, a property considered as a central condition of its cognitive and practical diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociotecimical infrastructure required to implement environmental policies has a definite political content: it frames and influences public action, most often in an implicit way. In this paper we take a normative stance on democratic governance, which raises the need for making this infrastructure debatable. We focus on the specific case of drought management in France, which has developed an infrastructure that consists of zoning, measurement networks and threshold definition for critical flows in order to be able to assess a current hydrological situation in any place and to associate it to a specific crisis level. First we identify the various criticisms voiced by stakeholders in drought commit- tees such as challenging the infrastructure's technical validity setting out its inadequacy to a specific context, disqualifying its use due to the gap between science and the existing practice. We then suggest introducing a tool borrowed from the anthropology of techniques : the operational chain. We propose to use it to render explicit and debatable the infrastructure, its structure and content and on top of that the “regulatory science” which it stems from. This tool entails overcoming the various forms of criticism observed as well as dealing collectively with the tension between principles of justice and adaptation to local conditions. We argue that it may also provide a medium to associate lay people in the development or the revision of the infrastructure itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: According to a paper by Souriau et al., published in 2002, the first bang heard by the population of Toulouse during the blast at the AZF plant, on 21st September 2001 should be the seismo-acoustic wave produced by the AZF explosion, i.e. an indirect wave generated as a transmission wave through the Earth''s crust (i.e., a seismic wave) and a refraction wave (i.e., an acoustic wave). We apply the criterion proposed by the authors in favour of a seismo-acoustic wave and show that the latter cannot be validated according to the data corresponding to the first bang. On the other hand, we show that the AZF seismo-acoustic wave has been perceived by only a few witnesses, but as rumblings and not as a bang. Consequently, AZF seismo-acoustic wave and first bang are two phenomena to be clearly discriminated. In particular, the source of the first bang is totally independent of that of the AZF explosion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Our paper shows how the representations and knowledge French sheep farmers have of their rangelands are embedded in the relations they build with their animals and the natural environment. These sheep farmers, who work and live in the causse Méjan, a low mountain area in southern France, describe their grazinglands not only as pools of feeding resources, but also as a set of more or less adequate ecological conditions for their animals' wellbeing. The perception they have of the rangeland heterogeneity involves a systemic and dynamic perspective that takes into account both these dimensions, and insists upon the importance of the seasonal changes which occur along the year in the natural environment. They learn the "milieu" to a great extent from observing their animals' feeding behaviour. We show that the modernisation process has not obliterated the importance of the affective and relational dimensions in the construction of animal herding knowledge, particularly regarding ecological knowledge. Scientists and extension services should consequently better take account of informal knowledge acquisition processes when seeking to understand the farmers' rationale and accompanying the transformation of this activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Evidence of earliest human settlements had been searched in the alluvial formations laid down in the Middle Loire Basin. Many stepped sheets deposited during the successive interglacial–glacial quaternary cycles are studied in four valleys of the Loire tributaries: the Creuse, Indre, Cher and Loir rivers. These sandy remnants are systematically dated, using the Electron Spin Resonance method applied on bleached fluvial quartz. Five settlements which contain very Early Palaeolithic industries with Mode 1 technology were occupied during the Lower Pleistocene. About eighty sites with hand-axe assemblages are observed in Middle Pleistocene remnants; nine of these are described in this paper. The results theorize that the geographical center of France (47°N) would be reached by two influxes of human populations with an interval around 400 years, because major climatic pejorations, particularly at the end of the Lower Pleistocene. These two populations produced lithic industries with many differences in supply of raw materials and in techniques of striking. Not any typologic link had been observed joining the two industrial unities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the Middle Palaeolithic of western Europe, raw material circulations seemed limited to a hundred of kilometres. This paper focuses on the circulation of flints on more than 250km (minimal distances) in the Mousterian site of Champ Grand, France. Real distances are longer than 400km. Modalities of circulation are exposed. The analyses of these products demonstrate an important anticipation concerning the mobile raw materials’ management. These data demonstrate that this Mousterian site is a point in a complex and ramified settlement of the landscape. Diachronic relations with behavioural aspects of Upper Palaeolithic societies are exposed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper reports on small mountain glacier variations in the northern Belledonne region (French Alps). Between 1926 and 2006, the evolution is surveyed using remote-sensing techniques. Then, it is correlated with climate data for the same period. In the late 1920s and in 1980, there was a maximum extent of the glaciers. The 1980 surge is due to high precipitations during the late 1970s, a similar trend being punctually observed in 1993. Between 1980 and 2003, the Rocher Blanc glaciers have strongly receded, their total surface being divided by ten. From 1997 onward, the large retreat can be explained by the increase of the mean daily temperature, especially the minimum daily temperature. Moreover, unusually high temperatures have been registered during the summer 2003 heat wave. Small mountain glaciers appear to be more sensitive to climate change than larger ones. Their surfaces change within 6 to 12 months. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper investigates the relative influence of waves, wind-induced current and tidal current on the sediment mobility of a macro-tidal environment belonging to the inner shelf seaward of the ‘pertuis Charentais’ (France). This study, mainly based on three-week hydrodynamic in-situ measurements, shows that, for a water depth of 23 m, the swell (rather than wind waves) orbital velocity is large enough to initiate the motion of medium sands that are then transported by currents. Estimations show that medium sand of 0.2 mm is transported during 92% of the measurements, whereas coarse sand and gravel move sporadically, during storm, synchronously with spring tides. Further more, bedload fluxes appear strongly larger when waves are taken into account (370 times larger for 0.2-mm sands). To cite this article: D. Idier et al., C. R. Geoscience 338 (2006). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Age at death and sex diagnosis of the Cro-Magnon fossils (Dordogne, France) based on the pelvic bone. This paper concerns the sex and age at death estimation of the Gravettian skeletons from Cro-Magnon site (Dordogne, France). Methods based on pelvic bone and probabilistic approach have been used. These methods have been tested elsewhere and provide a high accuracy level for sex and age determination. This analysis shows without ambiguity that two adults are male (hip bone 4315, 4315–4318), one is a female (pelvic bone 4316). The sex diagnosis of the last (pelvic bone 4317) is indeterminate. As the adult female is aged (more 50 years), she cannot be the mother of the newborn identified in the burial place. To cite this article: D. Gambier et al., C. R. Palevol 5 (2006) . [Copyright &y& Elsevier]