Eugen Weber

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Eugen J. Weber (Born April 24, 1925 in Bucharest, Romania) is a prominent historian. He immigrated to the United Kingdom as a young man and studied at the Ashville College in Windermere. During World War II, he served with the British Army in Belgium, Germany and India between 1943 and 1947. Afterwards, Weber studied history at the Sorbonne and Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in Paris, France.

He lived in Britain for a time, graduating with a BA in 1950 and a MA from Cambridge in 1954. In 1950, he married Jacqueline Brument-Roth. Weber worked as a professor at Emmanuel College in Cambridge (1953–1954), University of Alberta (1954–1955), University of Iowa (1955–1956) and the University of California (1956–1993). He ultimately came to the United States, joining the faculty of UCLA. He has published a variety of works, in addition to hosting The Western Tradition, a PBS program consisting of his lectures on the Western world. He is now professor emeritus of history at UCLA.

Weber's main interest is French history. His first book, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 was a study of integral nationalism in France in the decade before World War One. Weber was to follow this book with further studies in French fascism and right-wing radicalism in Action Française and Varieties of Fascism. Weber has drawn a distinction between what he considers to be reactionary authoritarian and fascist movements. At a conference in Moscow in 1970, Weber argued that "fascism and communism were not antithetical but fréres ennemis".

Another area of interest for Weber is nation-building in France during the 19th century. Weber has studied the political importance of sports in fin de siècle France, where he has argued that contemporaries believed that healthy bodies made for healthy nations and weak bodies for decadent and defeated nations. Thus, Weber has presented a case that for the French in this period, sports were a matter of critical national importance.

In his book Peasants Into Frenchmen, Weber examined school records, migration patterns, military service documents and economic trends to argue that until the middle of the Third Republic, a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas. The book was widely praised, but was criticized by some historians who argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870.

[edit] Works

The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905-1914, 1959.
Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (1962).
"Nationalism, Socialism and National-Socialism in France" pages 273-307 from French Historical Studies, Volume 2, 1962.
Satan France-Maçon: la mystification de Leo Taxil, 1964.
Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twenthieth Century (1964).
co-edited with Hans Rogger, The European Right: A Historical Profile, 1965.
"Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organized Sports in France" pages 3-26 from Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 5, 1970.
"Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-Siècle France: Opium of the Classes?" pages 70-98 from American Historical Review, Volume 76, 1971.
A Modern History of Europe: Men, Cultures, and Societies from the Renaissance to the Present (1971).
Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976).
"Comment la politique vint aux paysans: A Second Look at Peasant Politicization" pages 357-389 from American Historical Review, Volume 87, 1982.
"Reflections on the Jews in France" from The Jews in Modern France edited by Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, 1985.
France, Fin de siécle (1986).
My France: Politics, Culture, Myth, 1991.
The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (1994).
Apocalypses (1999).