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The term revisionism returns to several more or less close directions, indicating in a total way of the currents of thought tending to call into question and to more or less deeply modify an ideological system or political bench, an international treaty or a major legal text, or of the facts considered as histories.

The uses of the term through the history very many and were varied. Its use about the Second world war restricted in the general public the use of the term on this only subject.

In the historical field :

Among the historians, the word was traditionally used in a direction more often neutral than pejorative, to describe work or ideas of a historian who calls into question a widespread perception of a particular subject. ( See the section “historical Revisionism”. )

the concept of revisionism can also indicate, more specifically, the questioning of certain aspects of the history of the Second world war by the negation, the minimization or the dispute of certain elements of the Génocide made by the Nazis. The majority of the historians prefer today to him the term of Négationnisme. The negationnists themselves generally preserve the use of “revisionism”.

By widening this last significance of the word, “revisionism” can also be employed in a pejorative direction, used by observers not historians, to indicate a skewed historical work aiming at establishing that certain last events did not take place.

In the political arena:

Within the socialist Movement, the term of revisionism and the abbreviation “réviso” was used to qualify the position of currents Marxiste S which claimed to call into question some of the revolutionary theses, or, thereafter, deviated from orthodoxy Marxist-Leninist. The principal use of the term was made in Germany with socialism revisionist () of Eduard Bernstein within SPD in the years 1890. In France, the positions of the French Communist party were qualified “revisionists” by certain bunches gauchists.

Within the Movement Zionist, the Sionisme revisionist was a movement created by Vladimir Jabotinsky, which affirmed that the terms of the British mandate in Palestine were to be re-examined to reveal explicitly the objective of the creation of a Jewish State. Today, the Israeli party Likoud is downward direct Zionists revisionists.

In France at the end of the years 1880, one designated “republican radical revisionists” the having supported the Général Baker and the Boulangisme at the end of the XIXe century. The republican National committee revisionist claimed a " indeed; révision" constitution of the IIIe Republic.

In Germany, in Hungary, and Italy after 1918, the revisionism indicates the currents claiming a revision of the Traité of Versailles.

Historical revisionism

The revisionism is a critical step consisting in revising in a rational way certain usually allowed opinions in history, that it is by the general public (generally), or even by historians of profession not specialists in the period or field of studies considered. It is based on a contribution of new information, a re-examination of the sources and proposes a new interpretation (a rewriting) of the Histoire.

As had discovered it Auguste Count, the history is a basically ambiguous discipline, where the interpretation of historical reality must often compose with the truths of its time, the historian being convened to hold the speech awaited from him by his contemporaries, his company, according to the prejudices of his time, his nation of membership, etc an obvious example, brought back by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is the work of Jules Michelet, building at the 19th century an eternal French fatherland, through a reading romantic (and sometimes romantic) of the historical facts. Any historian must thus be according to these terms “revisionist”. New documents, new sources, the lifting of barriers political, ideological, sociological, etc, enable him to revise and bring with a new vision, new information, new sources, additional elements with the construction of the historical fact.

An example of positive revisionism can be found in the study of the massacres of Katyn, carried out on order of Stalin and allotted by the Soviets, with the tacit support of allied in particular English, with the Germans in the particular context with the lawsuit of Nuremberg. In the immediate future after war, it was of “public notoriety” that the Germans were responsible. The academics and medical examiners who affirmed the opposite underwent various pressures going until exclusion. From the fall of the Berlin Wall, the veil rose little by little and Boris Eltsine ends up going to the site and presented his excuses to the Polish people. The revisionism thus must to fall well and always under the step of the historian.

An example of revisionism, to distinguish from the Négationnisme, relates to the Nazism. The famous quarrel of the historians having had course especially in Germany in the years 1980, was the occasion for certain historians and philosophers (it thus is badly named) German to just like present the Nazism before a reaction to Communism and to examine the history of the Nazisme from a point of view emphatic, the two approaches tending to minimize the radicality of the Nazism, and also of the Shoah. This case is extremely complex since it intermingled founded methodological debate and more or less avowable political reasons.

Let us mention finally that “revisionism” very often indicates in movements of ideas or ideologies political, dissenting branches, calling into question the majority tendency. The “revisionism” also indicated the movement requiring the revision of the lawsuit Dreyfus, it is besides this step which gave its current direction at the end.

The term was also abundantly used in the Années 1950; holding of the Stalinist Vulgate readily taxed (inter alia Hérétique S) the government with the Yugoslavia of “revisionism titist”.

Charges of revisionism

The historian Annie Lacroix-Rice was the subject of charges of revisionism, in particular by an association of Ukrainians in France which organized a petition “inviting more the high ranking authorities of the State to all to implement to fight against the Stalinist revisionism”, that one can reasonably interpret like a request for suspension as professor of university. Annie Lacroix-Rice had reduced the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 to “a serious food shortage leading to a strict reinforcement of rationing, not a famine and in any case not a famine with " six million morts" ”, denouncing a “operation of propaganda”, a “tall story”, a “press campaign”. If the genocidary character of the Ukrainian famine is disputed, the responsibility for the Soviet capacity in this tragedy is generally recognized by the historians.

The article caused strong reactions among associations of the Ukrainian diaspora, of which the Ukrainian World congress, following an article on the “genocidary famine” in Ukraine in 1933 (Holodomor), collection of documents tending to allot its charge to Joseph Stalin to a propaganda campaign, where it called into question the sources - coming from the German chancelleries and Italian in.liaison.with the the Vatican - having been used to prove her organized character and to evaluate the number of deaths. Annie Lacroix-Rice showed in return the Ukrainian World congress of anti-semitism while being pressed on a letter of her President, Askold S. Lozynskyj, with the NewYork Times in which he affirmed “the man to which Joseph Stalin entrusted the task to perpetrate this crime was a Jew, Lazar Kaganovich. (...) Norman Davies, celebrates it British historian, concluded that no nation lost as many inhabitants at the 20th century the Ukraine. It is mainly the result of the activity at the same time Communists and Nazis in Ukraine. The Russians and the Germans were wild. But the Jews were worse. They betrayed their neighbors and did it with an accomplished zeal! ”

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