ABSTRACT
Was World War II an important rupture for twentieth century mathematics? According to the traditional historiography of mathematics, it may seem surprising to assign a status that is a priori epistemological to such a political event, however major it may have been. No historical event has hitherto been submitted to such an appraisal. What does it mean to confront mathematics and its development with a precise historical moment that is above all characterized by its political dimensions? A special topic in the work of several historians of science, the period of the French Revolution has similarly been studied, mostly in regard to the transformation of the social and institutional conditions for scientific life. These historians have emphasized the importance of the constitution of a true scientific community and of related institutions set up by the Revolution. As for mathematical disciplines, however, the history of analysis from Lagrange to Cauchy is still often written without the Revolution being explicitly mentioned; in the case of geometry, given Monge's political role in the foundation of the École polytechnique where descriptive geometry was taught for the first time, the intimate link of its destiny with the revolutionary event has, on the contrary, been widely recognized.
