François Furet

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François Furet
Born(1927-03-27)27 March 1927
Paris, France
Died12 July 1997(1997-07-12) (aged 70)
Figeac, France
Known forHistorian of the French Revolution
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Paris

François Furet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa fyʁɛ]; 27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University of Chicago.

Furet was elected to the

Académie française
in March 1997, just three months before he died in July.

Biography

Born in Paris on 27 March 1927 into a wealthy family, Furet was a bright student who graduated from the Sorbonne with the highest honors and soon decided on a life of research, teaching and writing.

Académie française. He died in July 1997 in a Toulouse hospital while being treated for head injuries he incurred in an accident on a tennis court. He was survived by his wife Deborah, daughter Charlotte and son Antoine from a previous marriage to Jacqueline Nora.[4]
There is now a François Furet school in the suburbs of Paris as well as a François Furet prize given out every year.

Furet's major interest was the French Revolution. Furet's early work was a social history of the 18th century

class struggle. As other French historians of his generation like Jacques Godechot or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Furet was open to ideas of English language historians, especially Alfred Cobban. Likewise, Furet frequently lectured at American universities and from 1985 onwards taught at the University of Chicago. In his first work on the Revolution, 1966's La Révolution, Furet argued that the early years of the Revolution had a benign character, but after 1792 the Revolution had skidded off into the blood lust and cruelty of the Reign of Terror
. The cause of the Revolution going off course was the outbreak of war in 1792 which Furet controversially argued was intrinsic to the Revolution itself, rather than being an unrelated event as most French historians had argued until then.

The other major theme of Furet's writings was its focus on the political history of the Revolution and its relative lack of interest in the Revolution's social and economic history. Other than a study of Lire et écrire (1977), a study co-edited with Jacques Ozouf concerning the growth of literacy in 18th century France, Furet's writings on the Revolution tended to focus on its historiography. In a 1970 article in Annales, Furet attacked "the revolutionary catechism" of Marxist historians. Furet was especially critical of the "Marxist line" of

Jacobin than Marxist. Furet argued that Karl Marx was not especially interested in the Revolution and that most of the views credited to him were really the recycling of Jacobinism.[3]

Furet considered

totalitarian twins in terms of violence and repression.[5]

From 1995 until his death on 12 July 1997 in Figeac, Furet's views about totalitarianism led to a debate via a series of letters with the German philosopher Ernst Nolte. The debate had been started by a footnote in Furet's Le passé d'une illusion criticising Nolte's views over the relationship between Bolshevism and fascism, 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 Bolshevism.

The Parisian newspaper Le Figaro called him "a revolutionary of the Revolution". According to the newspaper, "One could even say that there is a Furetian school (of the Revolution)," with a "galaxy" of professors and writers, influenced by Furet, living in France, the United States and the United Kingdom.[6]

Furet was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.[7][8]

French Revolution

Furet was the leading figure in the rejection of the classic or Marxist interpretation. Desan (2000) concluded he "seemed to emerge the victor from the bicentennial, both in the media and in historiographic debates".[9]

Furet, an ex-

Annales School.[10]

Furet then re-examined the Revolution from the perspective of 20th-century totalitarianism as exemplified by

Commune of Paris in 1871.[12]

Working much of the year at the University of Chicago after 1979, Furet also rejected the Annales School with its emphasis on very long-term structural factors and emphasized intellectual history. Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin, Furet argues that Frenchmen must stop seeing the Revolution as the key to all aspects of modern French history.[13] His works include Interpreting the French Revolution (1981), a historiographical overview of what has preceded him and A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989).[14][15]

Because of his influence in history and historiography, Furet was granted some of the field's most prestigious awards,[citation needed] 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

Methodology

Furet's concerns were not only historical, but historiographical as well. 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.

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)
  • "Beyond the Annales", The Journal of Modern History Vol. 55, No. 3, September 1983 in JSTOR
  • "Terrorism and Democracy". Telos 65 (Fall 1985). New York: Telos Press
  • Marx and the French Revolution with Lucien Calvié, (University of Chicago Press, 1988)
  • "The Monarchy and the Procedures for the Elections of 1789", The Journal of Modern History Vol. 60, No. 3, September 1988 in JSTOR
  • "The French Revolution Revisited" Government and Opposition (1989) 24#3 pp: 264–282. online
  • Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (coedited with Mona Ozouf, 1992, 2 vol.)
    • A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard U.P. 1989)
  • Le Siècle de l'avènement républicain (with Mona Ozouf, 1993)
  • Le Passé d'une illusion, essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle (1995)
    • The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, (translated by Deborah Furet, University of Chicago Press, 1999).
      ISBN 0-226-27341-5
  • co-written with
    ISBN 0-8032-1995-4
    .
  • La Révolution, Histoire de France
    • Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (translated by Antonia Nevill) (Oxford U.P., 1995).
  • Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry
  • Lies, Passions, and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century, (translated by Deborah Furet, University of Chicago Press, 2014).
    ISBN 978-0-226-11449-1

Notes

  1. ^ Riding, Alan (16 July 1997). "Francois Furet, Historian, 70; Studied the French Revolution". The New York Times.
  2. ISBN 80-7203-452-9
    .
  3. ^ a b David Robin Watson (1999). "Furet, François", The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 1, Chicago Fitzroy Dearborn, p. 426-427.
  4. ^ "François Furet".
  5. ISBN 9780520295193
    .
  6. ^ "François Furet". www-news.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  7. ^ "François Furet". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-04-21.
  8. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-04-21.
  9. ^ Suzanne Desan, "What's after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography", French Historical Studies, Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2000, pp. 163–196 in Project MUSE
  10. ^ Michael Scott Christofferson, "François Furet between History and Journalism, 1958–1965". French History, Dec 2001, Vol. 15 Issue 4, pp 421–447
  11. ISBN 9781782389743
    .
  12. ^ Michael Scott Christofferson, "An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Francois Furet's Penser la Revolution francaise in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s", French Historical Studies, (1999) 22#4 pp. 557-611
  13. ^ James Friguglietti and Barry Rothaus, "Interpreting vs. Understanding the Revolution: François Furet and Albert Soboul", Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1987, (1987) Vol. 17, pp 23–36
  14. ^ Claude Langlois, "Furet's Revolution", French Historical Studies, Fall 1990, Vol. 16 Issue 4, pp 766-776
  15. ^ Donals Sutherland, "An Assessment of the Writings of François Furet", French Historical Studies, Fall 1990, Vol. 16 Issue 4, pp 784–91

Further reading

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