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Before the Lomé Convention (1975) was signed between the European Economic Community (EEC) and 46 African Caribbean and Pacific States, the EEC member states had to deal with the African members of the Commonwealth. Among the Six France was in a peculiar position, wishing to maintain a special relationship between the EEC and the French-speaking African states and to enlarge its relations with other regions of the Third World. This article, based on an examination of the French Foreign Ministry Archives and the Papiers Foccart, aims to investigate the prehistory of the relations between the EEC and the English-speaking African states. It analyses the French role in the debate, outcomes and consequences of the first agreements signed by the European Community with Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. To this aim it will focus on the negotiations between the EEC and the African states, but also on the debate which took place in some international organisations on the Yaoundé Convention, in order to understand to what extent these discussions paved the way for the evolution of the EEC Development Policy during the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1958, Armand Gatti, on the brink of becoming a famous dramatist, took a trip to North Korea in the company of Claude Lanzmann, Chris Marker and Jean-Claude Bonnardot. This was the first visit to this country by French intellectuals. There, in the midst of a political crisis gripping the country, Gatti wrote the screenplay for the film Moranbong, directed by Bonnardot. In proposing to link a love story in North Korea through the eyes of a French journalist with the rehearsals for the Korean opera Chunhyang, Gatti created a unique film. In this film, which disappeared for many years because it was censored on its release, we find Gatti’s reflections on political regimes and human destinies, his will to invent a new role for the artist and for art, the influence of Sartrian and Camusian existentialism and his fascination for Asian arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]