The last conflict of the Cold War or the first postmodern war, the operations that led to the liberation of Kuwait, in February 1991, were the result of a long and complex diplomatic process which culminated in a rapid air then land campaign. For France, who contributed a mixed force of nearly 20 000 troops - two-thirds of them from the army - the Gulf War raised the issue of how suitable its defence structure was to the conditions and realities of a changing world.

From August 1990, as part of the mission assigned by the UN, the French navy deployed over thirty ships - aircraft carriers, cruisers and helicopter carriers - nearly 7 000 marines and three marine commandos, with the missions of enforcing the embargo and transporting troops and equipment.

International relations expert Pierre Hassner likened the Cold War to a ”refrigerator effect”. If, for nearly half a century, the East-West standoff had ”frozen” regional complexities, the disappearance of that climate in the 1990s brought a resurgence of old animosities and marked the return of ”strategic disarray” during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

The military capability, the political instrument and operational control

By Tristan Lecoq

Inspector-General of National Education
Associate lecturer in contemporary history
at Paris-Sorbonne University

By Adeline Poussin, PhD in Ethnomusicology

Nice Sophia Antipolis University

LIRCES interdisciplinary research centre

The Mont Valérien monument stands against the fort's southeastern glacis. It forms an outer wall of Vosges pink sandstone, over 13 feet high and 300 feet across.

Sixteen studs, corresponding to the 16 tombs of the crypt, are spaced at regular intervals along it. Each is decorated with allegorical motifs in high-relief bronze.

A 40-foot Cross of Lorraine stands at the centre of the monument. Before it, an eternal flame burns in a bronze brazier.

Under the Occupation, the national anthem blossomed across the political spectrum, in both Free France and Vichy France, the so-called ”free” zone not occupied by the Germans.

Father (”abbé”) Blanc, born on 21 June 1903 in Maillane (Bouches-du-Rhône), the former curate of Sorgues in Vaucluse and La Capelette in Marseille, managed to assemble a small mixed team of resistance members at the beginning of 1943. The special services documents about the Blanc case illustrate very precisely the methods of infiltration, investigation and then repression used against the Resistance.

Spi-Fall Dellagnolo-Matrose (sailor) and Spionage Organisation Alliance: these code names reveal the stages in a joint investigation conducted by the Strasbourg Gestapo and the Paris SIPO-SD to bring down, twice, the members of the Alliance network, founded by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau in spring 1941.