“The interwar years” is a meaningful chrononym and is thus epoch-making in an extreme diversity of languages, one of the most universally shared ; however nowhere as in France is it burdened with so many issues. It is brought to the forefront as soon as 1940, also in literary historiography (Baldensperger, Brodin, Breton); however it takes along, in a more or less disguised way, an interrogation upon “the masters’responsibility” in the defeat which weakens it through its ideologizing process. In spite of its revealing character, the chrononym’s pertinence is, as a matter of fact, contested through several emplotments : the hypothesis of a “second Thirty Years War” ; the opposition between the open time of the “Roaring Twenties” and the cyclic time of the « Thirties ».