Bottom-up view of the Cold War in France. This collective project looks the French experience of the Cold War. It develops a novel approach from the bottum-up to grasp its meaning from the stand-point of local actors. It seeks to shift the focus away from the usual field of international relations which more often than not offers an oversimplified view of the Cold War. Instead, it rests on the assumption that it matters to look at the impact this world-view had on specific localities and what common people made of it, if we are to understand what it came to mean over time and specifically for French people. The contributors to this project do not intend to look again at the nature of the Cold War. They ask different questions altogether : how did people experience the Cold War and in which ways did it affect their lives ? How did it shape behaviors and ideas people had in specific places ? To which extent did the Cold War operate as a conceptual framework allowing common volks to make sense of what surrounded them ?
