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The idea that a technology gap between the United States of America and Western Europe existed emerged in the early 1960s. Western Europeans attributed the gap to a dramatic increase in direct American investment, government support for R and D, firm size, as well as the brain drain, while American Scholars argued that the roots of the gap were the archaic educational systems and the hierarchical social structures of Western Europe. In order to support their national computer industries against American competition, French and German policy makers chose to counter the technology gap by developing national support programs. Although both countries responded to the same socio-economic problem, the resulting industrial programs differed fundamentally. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of industrial policy in the 1960s and, through a comparative analysis show, how industrial policy is shaped by political and cultural aspects within individual countries.

En dépit d'une sensible amélioration des conditions de vie économiques et matérielles et malgré l'optimisme véhicule par l'esprit des Lumières, la pauvreté demeurait, dans les dernières décennies de la France d'Ancien Régime, un problème endémique et préoccupant. Convaincus que la France était touchée par un processus d'appauvrissement général, les intellectuels des Lumières demeurerent, tout au cours de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, extrêmement préoccupés par les questions liées à la pauvreté. Parmi la multitude d'intellectuels et de philosophes qui allèrent se prononcer sur les origines et les remèdes à adopter face aux problèmes de la mendicité et du vagabondage, les Physiocrates, qu'on considère à juste titre comme étant les premiers économistes français, furent également les premiers à proposer un ensemble de programmes cohérents et structures visant à éradiquer l'extrême pauvreté du royaume de France. Bien que les traités sur la pauvreté rédigés par Guillaume-François Le Trosne, Nicolas Baudeau et Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours reprirent, dans l'ensemble, les idées et les solutions avancées par les philosophes des Lumières, l'originalité de leurs démarches reposait sur l'édification de programmes pouvant être directement utilisés par les administrateurs du royaume.

Pour une raison encore inexpliquée, les notaires royaux d'Orléans conservèrent, dès 1385, les minutes des actes qu'ils passaient, ce que ne faisaient pas systèmatiquement leurs confrères instrumentant ailleurs dans le Nord de la France. De cette conjoncture est issue la présente recherche, qui se veut un double redressement réhabiliter l'étude du notariat en pays coutumier et aborder les actes notariés dans leur intégralité en tenant compte de leur auteur. Que signifiait être clerc notaire du Chatelet d'Orléans en 1437? Les minutes de Pierre Christophe, Guillaume Girault et Jehan de Recouin permettent d'effectuer une comparaison. Il en ressort que l'expérience et les aspirations propres à chaque notaire sont perceptibles dans la tenue de leur registre et les caracteristiques de leur clientele et ce, malgré le fait qu'ils travaillaient tous au même endroit dans des conditions semblables en utilisant les normes établies ou conseillées par la prévôté.

The transformation of the principle of subsidiarity from a philosophical principle in Catholic social teachings to a constitutional article in the 1992 Treaty on European Union has been a source of confusion for scholars of European integration. Political scientists have examined subsidiarity from the perspective of political philosophy to account for its transformation and to determine its impact on European integration. However, no attempt has been made to anchor the emergence of subsidiarity in a historical context. This thesis employs a historical approach to analyze the transformation of subsidiarity. It examines the political struggles surrounding the principle in the Catholic Church, in German Christian Democracy, and in the debates over European Union in the European Community. It concludes that the transformation of subsidiarity occurred during the debates over the European Union that began in the 1970s and culminated in the ratification of the 1992 Maastricht treaty on European Union.

The First World War caught Europe's military establishments largely unprepared for a conflict that exceeded contemporary expectations of length, scale and advances in technology. The British Army was no exception. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) may have entered the war as one of the most professional forces in the field, but throughout the war British generalship suffered from a distinct lack of imagination in their attempts at coping with the realities of modern warfare. Indeed, the names of such battles as Loos, Arras, the Somme, and Passchendaele evoke images of tragic and unnecessary waste of thousands of lives. Amongst all the major protagonists, Britain alone possessed a truly extensive catalogue of experience pointing to what a future conflict on continental Europe might entail, courtesy of the many colonial wars Britain fought during the nineteenth century. During the Omdurman campaign (1898) and the South African War (1899-1902) in particular, the brutal effectiveness of the machine gun, smokeless gunpowder, quick-firing artillery, trench warfare, and the complexities of organizing large formations were clearly demonstrated. These lessons seemed mostly forgotten or ignored, despite the existence of substantial reform sentiment and current criticisms of the Army's performance in Africa prior to 1914. Why had the British military failed to capitalize on its experiences in its African campaigns and bring those lessons with them into the First World War? Almost the entire British Army High Command from 1914 to 1918 had participated in the Sudanese and South African campaigns, yet virtually to the man they proved remarkably resilient in rejecting the lessons on modern warfare learned by the lower ranks at a very high human cost. Even when these lessons were reinforced by the observations of British officers during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), they went largely ignored or misinterpreted. What prevented the senior British officers from heeding the voices of commonsense? Experiences during the South African War were considered anomalous and it was suggested impossible to apply to a European context. There was also a general trend of imparting more emphasis on personal training and qualities of elan as the best method of dealing with advanced battlefield technology. Britain's social hierarchy also played a part in this process, abetted by the fact that the majority of senior officers were from the Cavalry Arm, perhaps the most resistant to any sort of change or reform and comprised mainly of members of Britain's elite class. In addition, the British Army, like any other army in history, suffered from an institutional unwillingness to adopt new ideas and technology. A notoriously spendthrift British peace time government compounded the situation by ensuring that not only would there be substantial resistance to reform but that any reform would be constrained by tight fiscal considerations of Parliament and His Majesty's Treasury. This thesis will examine the reasons why the lessons of imperial and African conflicts were largely dismissed by military strategists on the eve of the Great War and reveal how such thinking lay in a long running conflict between the Victorian outlook on life and the new realities of the world ushered in by Industrialism. With the rise of Industrialism in Britain, this clash began to take form as the established British elite class saw a host of social ills residing within the movement that threatened their perceived order of society, especially their place at the top of that order. This clash of "progress versus nostalgia," a term coined by Martin J. Weiner in his book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, was a driving force behind the British High Command's struggle to undo the reform efforts of men such as Field Marshal Roberts and Richard Haldane as the Victorian/Edwardian elite class sought to bring this conflict to a resolution. The end result was that in 1914, the British Army, having only partially benefited from its African experience, was still in a state of transition and even those small gains had vanished along with most of the original BEF by early 1915.