François Furet

François Furet (27 March 1927 – 12 July 1997) was a French historian, and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation.

Biography

Furet was born in Paris, and received his education at the Lycée Janson-Sailly, and was awarded an "agrégation" from the Faculté de Lettres in Paris. 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. 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, supporting himself with a job at the Nouvel Observateur between 1956-66. In 1966, he began work 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 EHESS in Paris and as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 1997, he was elected to the Académie Française but died from a heart attack on a tennis court at the age of seventy, 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.

Furet's major interest was the French Revolution. Furet's early work was a social history of the 18th century bourgeoisie but, after 1961, his focus shifted to the Revolution. While initially a Marxist and supporter of the Annales School, he later separated himself from Les Annales and undertook a critical re-evaluation of the way the French Revolution is interpreted by Marxist historians. He became the leader of the "revisionist" school of historians who challenged the Marxist account of the French Revolution as a form of class struggle. Unlike most French historians of his generation, Furet was open to ideas of English language historians, especially Alfred Cobban. Likewise, Furet frequently lectured at American universities, 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 course 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 Albert Soboul, which Furet maintained was actually more 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.

Furet coined the term "totalitarian twins", likening Communism to Fascism and Nazism. Furet’s views about totalitarianism led to a debate from 1995 until his death 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 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.

Intellectual interpretations

Furet's 1978 work "Interpreting the French Revolution" set about to imagine the Revolution less as the result of social and class conflict and more 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 the authoritarian coup that brought about Napoleon's empire in 1799. The egalitarian origins of the Revolution were not undone by the Empire and were resurrected in the July Revolution of 1830, the 1848 Revolution, and the Commune of Paris in 1871.

Because of his influence in history and historiography, Furet 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

Methodology

Furet's concerns were not only historical but also historiographical. 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)
• "Terrorism and Democracy". TELOS 65 (Fall 1985). New York: Telos Press
• 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

References

• Schönpflug, Daniel. Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and A Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements, pp. 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.
• Watson, David Robin Furet, François, pp. 426-427 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 1, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.

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