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The Vanoise affair, as it is commonly called in oral accounts and in the historiography of the protection of nature in the 1960s, is both an issue concerning ecological memory and a historians? archive, after having been a battlefield of one of the first major confrontations between the public and town planners in France. It shows the first attempts to curtail the law on national parks, private developers? interests in tourist resorts, local municipal politics and the growth of grassroots nature protectors. The article studies this emergence of a particular historic 'form'? taking its inspiration from the sociology of public problems and scientific content.