François Furet

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François Furet (27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was an influential French historian.

Contents

[edit] Biography

After beginning his studies at the University of Letters and Law in Paris, Furet was forced to leave school in 1950 due to a case of tuberculosis. After recovering, he sat for the agrégation and passed the highly-competitive exams with a focus in History in 1954. After a stint teaching in high schools, he began work on the French Revolution at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, all the while supporting himself with a job at the soon-to-be Nouvel Observateur. In 1960, he began at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he would later be president (from 1977 to 1985).

Furet served as Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 1997, he was elected to the Academie Française and was enjoying the success of his latest book Le passé d'une illusion (a reference to Freud's work on religion). He died in 1997 from a heart attack on a tennis court at the age of 70, leaving behind his wife Deborah, daughter Charlotte, and son Antoine from a previous marriage. There is now a François Furet school in the suburbs of Paris as well as a François Furet prize given out every year.

In 1949 Furet entered the Communist Party of France, this establish his realness, like many other noted historians of his generation: Michelle Perrot, Michel Vovelle and Jacques Le Goff. In 1956 he left the party.[1] At one point a Marxist and part of the Annales School, he later separated himself from Les Annales and undertook a critical reevaluation of the way the French Revolution is interpreted by Marxist historians.

[edit] Intellectual Interpretations

Furet's 1978 work "Interpreting the French Revolution" set about to imagine the Revolution as less the result of social and class conflict than as a conflict over the meaning and application of egalitarian and democratic ideas. He saw Revolutionary France as located ideologically between two revolutions: the first an egalitarian one that began in 1789, and the second being the authoritarian coup that brought about Napoleon's empire in 1799. The egalitarian origins of the Revolution were not undone by the Empire and saw instead a resurrection upon the July Revolution of 1830, the 1848 Revolution, and the Commune of Paris in 1871. All of these revolutions were firmly inscribed in légitimiste patterns as attempts on the part of the monarchy to reassert its authority over France.

Because of Furet's critical influence in history and historiography, he was granted some of the field's most prestigious awards, among them:

  • Tocqueville Award, 1990
  • The European Award for Social Sciences, 1996
  • The Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought, 1996
  • An honorary diploma (Honoris Causa) from Harvard University

[edit] Methodology

Furet's concerns were not only historical but also historigraphical. He attempted particularly to address distinctions between history as grand narrative and history as a set of problems that must be dealt with in a purely chronological manner.

[edit] Select Bibliography

[edit] In the Original French

  • La Révolution française, en collaboration avec Denis Richet, Fayard, Paris, 1965.
  • Penser la Révolution française, Gallimard, Paris, 1978.
  • L'atelier de l'histoire, Flammarion, Paris, 1982.
  • Le Siècle de l'avènement républicain, sous la direction de François Furet et Mona Ozouf, Gallimard, coll. « Bibliothèque des histoires », Paris, 1993.
  • Le Passé d'une illusion, essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle, Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1995, 580p.
  • Fascisme et Communisme: échange épistolaire avec l'historien allemand Ernst Nolte prolongeant la Historikerstreit
  • La Révolution, Histoire de France, Hachette, Paris.
  • Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution Française , en collaboration avec Mona Ozouf, 1992, 2 tomes.

[edit] Titles Available In English Translation

  • The French Revolution (2 volumes)
  • Interpreting the French Revolution
  • In the Workshop of History
  • Fascism and Communism ,Lincon, University of Nebraska Press, 2001
  • A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
  • Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry
  • The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century

[edit] References

Preceded by
Michel Debré		 Seat 1
Académie française
1997		 Succeeded by
René Rémond
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