Jean-François Revel (Marseille, France, January 19, 1924 – April 30, 2006 in
Kremlin-BicêtreLe Kremlin-Bicêtre is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located . from the center of Paris. It is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe....
) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
politician, journalist, author, prolific
philosopherPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and member of the
Académie françaiseL'Académie française, or the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution, it was...
since June 1998.
He was born Jean-François Ricard, but later adopted his pseudonym
Revel as his legal surname. During the German occupation of France in WWII, Revel participated in the
French ResistanceThe French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy Regime during World War II...
and later noted that the officious but disgraceful manner of French collaborators influenced his writings .
He studied at the
Lycée du ParcThe Lycée du Parc is a public secondary school located in the sixth arrondissement of Lyon, France. Its name comes from the Parc de la Tête d'Or, one of Europe's largest urban parks, which is situated nearby....
in
Lyon||-||}Lyon , often Anglicized as Lyons, is a city in east-central France in the region Rhône-Alpes, situated between Paris and Marseille. Its name is pronounced in French and Arpitan, and or in English...
and was accepted at the prestigious
École normale supérieureÉcole normale supérieure are French Grandes écoles initially conceived during the Revolution, and intended to provide the Republic with a new body of teachers, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment...
where he studied philosophy.
Jean-François Revel (Marseille, France, January 19, 1924 – April 30, 2006 in
Kremlin-BicêtreLe Kremlin-Bicêtre is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located . from the center of Paris. It is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe....
) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
politician, journalist, author, prolific
philosopherPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
and member of the
Académie françaiseL'Académie française, or the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution, it was...
since June 1998.
Life and career
He was born Jean-François Ricard, but later adopted his pseudonym
Revel as his legal surname. During the German occupation of France in WWII, Revel participated in the
French ResistanceThe French Resistance is the collective name used for the French resistance movements which fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy Regime during World War II...
and later noted that the officious but disgraceful manner of French collaborators influenced his writings .
He studied at the
Lycée du ParcThe Lycée du Parc is a public secondary school located in the sixth arrondissement of Lyon, France. Its name comes from the Parc de la Tête d'Or, one of Europe's largest urban parks, which is situated nearby....
in
Lyon||-||}Lyon , often Anglicized as Lyons, is a city in east-central France in the region Rhône-Alpes, situated between Paris and Marseille. Its name is pronounced in French and Arpitan, and or in English...
and was accepted at the prestigious
École normale supérieureÉcole normale supérieure are French Grandes écoles initially conceived during the Revolution, and intended to provide the Republic with a new body of teachers, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment...
where he studied philosophy. He began his career as a philosophy professor, and taught in French Algeria,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
and
MexicoThe United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, before settling in
LilleLille is a city in northern France. It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...
. He stopped teaching in 1963 and embarked on his career as an essayist and writer, as well as directing various publications. From 1998 to 2006, he was president of the Institut d'Histoire Sociale. His successor is
Emmanuel Le Roy LadurieEmmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a noted French historian whose work is mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ancien regime, focusing on the history of the peasantry.-Early life:...
.
A socialist until the end of the 1960's, (he ran as a socialist candidate in parliamentary elections in 1967 but lost), he was known during the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
as a champion of the western version of values such as liberty and democracy at a time when the majority of European intellectuals praised
CommunismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
or
MaoismMaoism, variably and officially known as Mao Zedong Thought , is a variant of Marxism derived from the teachings of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong , widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party of China from Mao's ascendancy to its leadership until the...
. The publication of his 1970 book,
Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun signalled the transition of his views to liberal "philosopher of freedom in the tradition of
Raymond AronRaymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist, well known to the broad public for his skeptical analyses of the post-war vogue in France for leftist ideologies that largely took their inspiration from a Marxist tradition.- Background :Aron, the son of...
." (D. Martin, NYT, p.B7)
He is survived by his second wife, Claude Sarraute, a journalist, and has 3 sons from two marriages. His first marriage to painter Yahne le Toumelin ended in divorce.
One of his sons,
Matthieu RicardMatthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal.Born in Aix Les Bains, he is the son of the late Jean-François Revel , a renowned French philosopher, and grew up among the personalities and ideas of French intellectual circles. He first traveled to...
, is a well known Buddhist monk who studied molecular biology at the
Pasteur InstituteThe Pasteur Institute is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, its founder and first director, who had successfully developed the first antirabies serum in 1885...
before converting to
Tibetan BuddhismTibetan Buddhism is the body of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and certain regions of the Himalayas, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, and India...
. Father and son jointly authored a book
Le moine et le philosophe (
The Monk and the Philosopher) about the son's conversion and Buddhism.
Work
He was best known for his books
Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun,
The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information and his 2002 book
Anti-Americanism, one year after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/02/AR2006050201708.html In the latter book, Revel criticised those Europeans who argued that the United States had brought about the terrorist attacks upon itself through misguided foreign policies. He wrote thus: "Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States, acting in her own self-interest, is also acting in the interest of us Europeans and in the interests of many other countries, threatened, or already subverted and ruined, by terrorism."
Partial booklist
- Without Marx or Jesus (1972) ISBN 0440597293
- The Totalitarian Temptation (1976)
- How Democracies Perish (1983)
- The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information (1992) ISBN 0394576438
- Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse/Regain démocratique (1993) ISBN 0029263875
- The Monk and the Philosopher : A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life (1999) ISBN 0805211039
- The Anti-American Obsession: Its Functioning, Its Causes, Its Inconsequentialness/La obsesión antiamericana (2003) ISBN 1893554856
Quotations
- "... anarchy leads to despotism ... despotism leads to anarchy ..."
- "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
- "It is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are."
- "Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist,' while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up." From Europe's Anti-American Obsession. A similar statement can be found in his book Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books, 2004, p. 156 (paperback).
- "A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence"
External links
- http://chezrevel.net/
- http://chezrevel.net/cat/english/
- http://www.souvarine.fr/institut.php
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2163713,00.html L'Académie française
- Douglas Martin, "J-F Revel, French Philosopher, is dead at 82," May 2, 2006, Section B, Page 7, The New York Times