François Furet

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François Furet (27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was an influential French historian. He was also president of the Saint-Simon Foundation.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Intellectual interpretations 3 Methodology 4 Selected bibliography 5 Footnotes 6 References

[edit] Biography

After beginning his studies at the University of Letters and Law in his native 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, 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. He coined the term "totalitarian twins", likening Communism to Fascism despite their conflicts. Furet’s views about totalitarianism led to a debate between 1995 until his death via a series of letters with the German philosopher Ernst Nolte. The debate had been started by a footnote in Le passé d'une illusion criticizing Nolte’s views over the relationship between fascism and Communism, leading Nolte to write a letter of protest. Furet defended his view about “totalitarian twins” sharing the same origins while Nolte argued that fascism was a response to Communism

[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, or tolerant, 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.

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] Selected bibliography

• La Révolution française, en collaboration avec Denis Richet (The French Revolution, 2 volumes, 1965)
• Penser la Révolution française (Interpreting the French Revolution, 1978)
• L'atelier de l'histoire (In the Workshop of History, 1982)
• Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution Française (A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, with Mona Ozouf, 1992, 2 tomes)
• Le Siècle de l'avènement républicain (with Mona Ozouf, 1993)
• Le Passé d'une illusion, essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle (1995) this was translated by his wife Deborah Furet into English and titled The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. ISBN 0-226-27341-5
• co-written with Ernst Nolte Fascisme et Communisme: échange épistolaire avec l'historien allemand Ernst Nolte prolongeant la Historikerstreit, translated into English by Katherine Golsan as Fascism and Communism, with a preface by Tzvetan Todorov, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, ISBN 0803219954.

• La Révolution, Histoire de France
• Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• Schönpflug, Daniel. "Histoires Croisees: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and A Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements", pages 265-290 from European History Quarterly, Volume 37, Issue # 2, 2007.
• Shorten, Richard. "Europe’s Twentieth Century In Retrospect? A Cautious Note On The Furet/Nolte Debate", pages 285-304 from European Legacy, Volume 9, Issue #, 2004.

Preceded by Michel Debré

Seat 1 Académie française 1997

Succeeded by René Rémond