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In 1945, Leipzig was indeed the place to see the whole world, or at least all facets of the Second World War and its aftermath. The historic town centre of this city in the very heart of Germany had been largely destroyed in the first complete firestorm that the British bombing squads accomplished in December 1943. In total, 38 bombing raids on the city left large parts completely in ruins, including all cultural venues, dozens of churches, more than eighty percent of the trade fair buildings and forty percent of housing. Yet, Leipzig's military production survived intact, and the air armament factories went on producing right until the end of the war with the help of slave labour, namely some 20,000 concentration camp inmates, kept in the vicinity of Leipzig at Abtnaundorf, a satellite camp of Buchenwald.

Since Antoine Prost's three volume Les anciens combattants et la societe francaise, 1914-1939 (1977), subsequent histories of the period have largely accepted the benign role of French Great War veterans during the interwar period. This thesis re-examines the history of the veterans' movement. Were the veterans integral to French democracy Did they reject political extremism in favour of a peaceful and Republican civic action Can one judge their associations to have been an important obstacle to the development of a French fascism What influence did the culture of the Great War, widely held to have been important in Germany and Italy at the time, have on French veterans These questions are addressed in a detailed study of the Union nationale des combattants (UNC) from 1933 to 1939. Through the examination of the association's political discourse and militant action, the thesis argues that the UNC challenged the democratic claim of elected representatives to lead France. The association's plans for reform of the state would not have left parliamentary democracy intact. The UNC undertook militant political action that endorsed illegality and mirrored that of anti-Republican extra-parliamentary leagues. Ultimately, the association was one of many actors that contributed to the destabilisation of the French regime in the years before the defeat in May 1940.

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This study focuses on Ceaușescu’s cult in painting. Its aim is to demonstrate that in spite of obvious similarities with the master cult of Stalin, the Romanian leader's cult was not a simple adaptation of Stalin's cult, but it had its own particularities which became apparent precisely in his painted representations. The cult of Ceaușescu in painting incorporated local artistic traditions and styles (precisely mediaeval art and folk art) and developed its own form from an early period. It also followed the evolution of Ceaușescu's cult, the shifts and the themes elaborated by Romanian propaganda. Chapter 1 attempts to determine the place of the visual image within Ceaușescu's cult. It investigates different forms of the Ceaușescu cult through which he tried to master time and to impose his image as an extraordinary leader, admirable continuer of the great Romanian rulers. Chapter 2 deals with the shaping of cultural policy at the beginning of Ceaușescu rule. It focuses on the tense relationship between Marxism-Leninism, nationalism and Westernisation and tries to see how the neo-Stalinist cultural policy emerged at the beginning of the seventies and further shaped Ceaușescu's cult. Chapter з analyses the mechanisms of cult production within the Romanian Artists' Union. It also tries to identify the relationships that existed between the Union's leadership, the rank-and-file members of the Union and the organisations in charge with commissioning Ceaușescu's paintings. Chapter 4 explores the coalescence of the discourse on national art by contrasting Ceaușescu's speeches and writings with the ideas circulated on this topic by art historians and art critics. The analysis demonstrates intellectuals' penchant for the discourse on national art and their contribution to its refinement. Furthermore, this chapter tries to establish the link between Ceaușescu's cult and the circulation of the discourse on national art. Chapter 5 deals with the painted representations of Ceauşescu. It attempts to establish an iconography of the Romanian leader by investigating its main themes and the relationships between them.

This thesis investigates the evolution of the cultural memory of May 68 within French society, through a study of the effect of photography on the building and transmission of myths and icons over a period of 40 years. It begins with an examination of the role of photography in documenting the events of May 68, before moving on to consider the reproduction of these images at each ten-year anniversary of the event. A chronological study of the publication of photographs in dedicated collections and in media coverage of the movement follows this broad contextualisation and theoretical positioning, focusing in particular, although not exclusively, on the visual coverage afforded by Paris Match. This study of each ten-year anniversary and its significance permits the underlining of dominant and recurring myths linked especially to urban space and its visual representation; the masculine hegemony in visual representations of May 68, and finally the mythologisation of Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Following this, a study of the myths identified and their continued modification across the 40 years between the event and its latest anniversary is carried out, in which the creation of icons both in a photographic and human sense is interrogated. The methodological approach of this thesis derives from a range of studies on cultural memory and on the evolving role of photography in the formation of cultural memory in the twentieth century both universally and as a mode of representation that responds to the characteristics of contemporary French society. Overall, these analytical steps underline the heterogeneity of representations of May 68 and enable the formulation of conclusions regarding the importance of photography as a vector for the transmission of cultural memory not only in the French context of May 68 but in modern society at large.