Liliane Beaulieu - Clips from Bourbakian skits

Discussions about the overall plan of Bourbaki's Éléments de mathématique were led, for many years, by Jean Dieudonné, who at nearly every meeting submitted an outline to the critical eyes of his peers. In the as yet unpublished reports of the meetings, one reads that the members usually reacted to the ``overall-plan act'' as to a comical skit, mobbing the actor who brandished the prospect of hard toil. This paper studies the overall plans which were written for Bourbaki between 1935 and 1956 as evidences of some major turns in the early Bourbaki enterprise.