L'art et l'idéologie sont étroitement liés par leur fonction de représentation du réel. Les années 1960 et 1970 sont celles des grandes espérances révolutionnaires marxistes. Notre étude prend pour objet les artistes et la création artistique en Europe de l'Ouest. Au croisement des événements politiques et de la pensée des intellectuels, les artistes questionnent la pertinence et l'adéquation des formes artistiques à la perspective révolutionnaire. Le terrorisme, la guerre du Vietnam, la Guerre Froide, sont envisagés dans les rapports de pouvoirs politiques qu'ils instaurent. La question sexuelle est reliée à la transgression morale et politique. Les artistes interrogent la possibilité d'une intervention plus directement sociale et politique. / Art and ideology are closely related in their function of representation of reality. The 1960s and 1970s are those of major marxist revolutionary hopes. Our study focuses on artists and artistic creation in Western Europe. At the intersection of political events and thinking of intellectuals, artists question the relevance and adequacy of artistic forms to the revolutionary perspective. Terrorism, the Vietnam war, the cold war, are considered in the reports of political power they establish. Sexual issue is related to the moral and political transgression. The artists question the possibility of a more direct social and political intervention.

This thesis provides an analytical interpretation of the critique Dutch nineteenth-century statesman-cum-historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) articulated of French revolutionary ideology. It achieves an original reading of Groen's thought as Protestant right-order theory. This reading achieves a clarification of the functions that Scripture, 'nature', and 'history' have in his thought, and connects his thinking to that of a small group of contemporary British-based political theologians, notably Oliver and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, and their minority view on the ontological grounding of justice. Our comparison of Groen's argument of 'history' with that of Edmund Burke achieves original critical leverage on their concepts of 'history', and draws out that Burke's critique of the Revolution purposes to re-affirm English common law, while Groen's is an apologia for Christianity.