Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Encyclopedia
Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet (July 23, 1930 – July 29, 2006) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...

(EHESS) in 1969.

Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, but was also interested (and deeply involved) in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War (1954-62), during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army
French Army
The French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...

, as well as Jewish history
Jewish history
Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their religion and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Since Jewish history is over 4000 years long and includes hundreds of different populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad strokes...

. Having participated with Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 and Jean-Marie Domenach
Jean-Marie Domenach
Jean-Marie Domenach was a French writer and intellectual. He was noted as a left-wing and Catholic thinker.He took over in 1957 the editorship of Esprit, the literary and political journal of personalism founded in 1945 by Emmanuel Mounier and continued from 1950 to 1957 by Albert Béguin...

 in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), one of the first French new social movements, he criticized historical revisionism
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Historical revisionism is either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see...

. Vidal-Naquet, who never abandoned his fascination with Antiquity, was also a supporter of Middle East peace efforts.

Biography

Vidal-Naquet’s family belonged to the Sephardic Jewish community rooted in the Comtat Venaissin
Comtat Venaissin
The Comtat Venaissin, often called the Comtat for short , is the former name of the region around the city of Avignon in what is now the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France. It comprised roughly the area between the Rhône, the Durance and Mont Ventoux, with a small exclave located to the...

 (Carpentras
Carpentras
Carpentras is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.It stands on the banks of the Auzon...

, Avignon
Avignon
Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...

). He was born in Paris, and he was raised in bourgeois, Republican
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...

 and secular
Laïcité
French secularism, in French, laïcité is a concept denoting the absence of religious involvement in government affairs as well as absence of government involvement in religious affairs. French secularism has a long history but the current regime is based on the 1905 French law on the Separation of...

 environment. His father Lucien was a lawyer, of “Dreyfusard
Dreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

” temperament, who quickly entered the Resistance
French Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

 in order to avoid exile. In June 1940, the family moved to Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

. Arrested by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

 on May 15, 1944, Vidal-Naquet’s father was deported, along with his wife, in June 1944. They were sent to Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

, where they died. At 14 years old, Pierre Vidal-Naquet then hid in his grandmother’s house in the Drôme
Drôme
Drôme , a department in southeastern France, takes its name from the Drôme River.-History:The French National Constituent Assembly set up Drôme as one of the original 83 departments of France on March 4, 1790, during the French Revolution...

. There, he read a lot, including the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

, and came to know his cousin, the philosopher Jacques Brunschwig. He later learnt that the Nazis had made “his father dance,” something he would never forget.

After his studies at the lycée Carnot
Lycée Carnot
The Lycée Carnot is a public secondary and higher education school located at 145 Boulevard Malesherbes in the 17th arrondissement, Paris, France. A prestigious Parisian high school, it is also known as one the best classe préparatoire aux écoles de commerce...

 in Paris, he specialized in the history of Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, as well as in contemporary subjects such as the Algerian War (1954-1962) and the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

. He read Marc Bloch’s
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair...

 Strange Defeat, a book attempting to explain the causes of the defeat during the 1940 Battle of France
Battle of France
In the Second World War, the Battle of France was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, beginning on 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb , German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off and...

, which is one of the origins of his vocation as a historian. He discovered surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 (André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

, René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...

 and also Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...

), and founded a review at 18 years old, along with Pierre Nora
Pierre Nora
Pierre Nora is a French historian of Jewish descent. Elected to the French Academy on June 7, 2001, he is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history...

, Imprudence. The 1949 Rajk trial
László Rajk
László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist; politician, former Minister of Interior and former Minister of Foreign Affairs...

 definitively took out his will to adhere to the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...

 (PCF).

Pierre Vidal-Naquet first taught history at Orléans’s
Orléans
-Prehistory and Roman:Cenabum was a Gallic stronghold, one of the principal towns of the Carnutes tribe where the Druids held their annual assembly. It was conquered and destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt under the Roman Empire...

 high school (1955), before going to Caen’s
Caen
Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....

 university (1956-60) and then Lille
Lille
Lille 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...

 (1961-62). Reading Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...

 and Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....

, he would become a member of the “Paris School”, originally composed of Jean-Pierre Vernant
Jean-Pierre Vernant
Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars...

, Nicole Loraux, Marcel Detienne
Marcel Detienne
Marcel Detienne is a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He is Professor Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L...

 and himself. Their work would renew approaches to the study of Ancient Greece.

He then worked at the CNRS
Centre national de la recherche scientifique
The National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....

 (1962-64) and was named maître de conférences at the University of Lyon
University of Lyon
The University of Lyon , located in Lyon and Saint Etienne, France, is a center for higher education and research comprising 16 institutions of higher education...

 (1964-66). He was then named professor at the École pratique des hautes études
École pratique des hautes études
The École pratique des hautes études is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions....

, which became the EHESS.

Vidal-Naquet co-authored several books with Jean-Pierre Vernant, with whom he was friends. However, although Vernant was a “comrade” of the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...

 (PCF), Vidal-Naquet never belonged to any political party, with the exception of the Unified Socialist Party
Unified Socialist Party (France)
The Unified Socialist Party was a socialist political party in France, founded on April 3, 1960. It was originally led by Édouard Depreux , and by Michel Rocard .- History :...

 (PSU), which he considered a “mere discussion circle.”

Pierre Vidal-Naquet was married and the father of three children. He was also officer of the Légion d'honneur
Légion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...

and, in Greece, commander of the Phenix Order.

Activism

Pierre Vidal-Naquet defined himself as an “activist historian”, and while pursuing his studies never ceased engaging in political struggles and taking part in political committees, etc. A member of the Comité Audin, along with Jérôme Lindon (editor of the Minuit publishing house), he was one of the best known opponents of the use of torture by the French Army during the Algerian War (1954-62). Along with Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

 and 119, he signed the Manifesto of the 121
Manifesto of the 121
The Manifesto of the 121 was an open letter signed by 121 intellectuals and published on 6 September 1960 in the magazine Vérité-Liberté. It called on the French government, then headed by the Gaullist Michel Debré, and public opinion to recognise the Algerian War as a legitimate struggle for...

, a call for civil disobedience
Civil disobedience
Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance...

 against the Algerian war. Anti-colonialist, Vidal-Naquet was opposed to Guy Mollet’s
Guy Mollet
Guy Mollet was a French Socialist politician. He led the French Section of the Workers' International party from 1946 to 1969 and was Prime Minister in 1956–1957.-Early life and World War II:...

 French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) reformist party because of Mollet’s support of the First Indochina War
First Indochina War
The First Indochina War was fought in French Indochina from December 19, 1946, until August 1, 1954, between the French Union's French Far East...

 and Algerian War.

He was also opposed to the Regime of the Colonels (1967-74) in Greece. He supported peace efforts in the Middle East as well as the Europalestine
Europalestine
CAPJPO-Europalestine is a French non-governmental organization dedicated to the ending of "the occupation of the Palestinian territories" in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 242 passed after the Six-Day War in 1967...

 group. He thus declared: “I consider Sharon
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006....

 a criminal.”

With Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 and Jean-Marie Domenach
Jean-Marie Domenach
Jean-Marie Domenach was a French writer and intellectual. He was noted as a left-wing and Catholic thinker.He took over in 1957 the editorship of Esprit, the literary and political journal of personalism founded in 1945 by Emmanuel Mounier and continued from 1950 to 1957 by Albert Béguin...

, on February 8, 1971 he signed the manifesto of the Groupe d’informations sur les prisons, which, rather than speaking in the name of prisoners, aimed to give back to them the chance of speaking in their own voice.

Vidal-Naquet was also active in condemning denial of the Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...

. Vidal-Naquet, who had answered or criticized Holocaust negationist Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson
Robert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...

 in several of his works, once employed Faurisson as an example to illustrate "what the Armenian minorities might feel":

Let us imagine a negationist Robert Faurisson as a governmental minister, a Faurisson president of the Republic, a Faurisson general, a Faurisson ambassador, a Faurisson president of the Turkish Historical Commission and a member of the senate of the University of Istanbul, a Faurisson member of the United Nations, a Faurisson responding in the press each time the question of the Jews is raised. In brief, a state-sponsored Faurisson paired with an international Faurisson and, along with all that, a Talaat-Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...

 blessed, since 1943, with an official mausoleum in the country's capital.


Vidal-Naquet was one of the first scholars to deconstruct historical revisionism
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Historical revisionism is either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favourable light. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see...

, notably in The Assassins of Memory and Reflexions on Genocide. He was also opposed to the February 23, 2005 French law on colonialism
French law on colonialism
The February 23, 2005, French law on colonialism was an act passed by the Union for a Popular Movement conservative majority, which imposed on high-school teachers to teach the "positive values" of colonialism to their students...

 passed by the conservative Union for a Popular Movement
Union for a Popular Movement
The Union for a Popular Movement is a centre-right political party in France, and one of the two major contemporary political parties in the country along with the center-left Socialist Party...

 (UMP), but which was finally repealed by president Jacques Chirac
Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 , and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.After completing his studies of the DEA's degree at the...

 in the beginning of 2006. Vidal-Naquet also criticized the 1990 Gayssot Act which prohibits revisionist discourse, claiming that the law shouldn’t interfere in historical matters. Vidal-Naquet’s arguments against legislation relating to historical studies is not, however, a door opened to revisionist speech. He once declared that he would rather name revisionists “negationists”, and that he wouldn’t engage with them for “simple and scientific reasons. An astronomer doesn’t debate with an astrologer. I wouldn’t discuss with someone who supports the idea that the moon is made of Roquefort … it is impossible.”

Ancient Greece

  • La Grèce ancienne - Du mythe à la raison, with Jean-Pierre Vernant
    Jean-Pierre Vernant
    Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars...

    , Le Seuil, coll. Points, 1990
  • La Grèce ancienne - L’espace et le temps, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Le Seuil, coll. Points, 1991
  • La Grèce ancienne - Rites de passage et transgressions, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Le Seuil, coll. Points, 1992
  • Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Découverte, 2000
  • Les Grecs, les historiens et la démocratie, La Découverte, 2000
  • Œdipe et ses mythes, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Complexe, 2001
  • La démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs, Flammarion, coll. Champs, 2001
  • Le chasseur noir - Formes de pensées et formes de société dans le monde grec, Francois Maspero, Paris 1981
  • Le miroir brisé : tragédie athénienne et politique, Les Belles Lettres, 2002 (new edition)
  • Travail et esclavage en Grèce ancienne, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Complexe, 2002
  • Le monde d’Homère, Perrin, 2002
  • Fragments sur l’art antique, Agnès Viénot, 2002
  • L’Atlantide. Petite histoire d’un mythe platonicien, Les Belles Lettres, 2005 ; ISBN 2-251-38071-X.

Algeria

  • L’Affaire Audin, 1957-1978, éditions de Minuit, 1989 [nouvelle édition augmentée]
  • La torture dans la République : essai d’histoire et de politique contemporaine, 1954-1962, Minuit, 1998 (Torture: Cancer in Democracy, out of print)
  • Les crimes de l’armée française Algérie 1954-1962, La Découverte, 2001 (Préface inédite de l’auteur)
  • La Raison d’État. Textes publiés par le Comité Audin, La Découverte, 2002 (nouvelle édition du livre publié en 1962 aux éditions de Minuit)

Jewish history and revisionism

  • The Assassins of Memory and Other Essays, articles on Robert Faurisson
    Robert Faurisson
    Robert Faurisson is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers , which deny various aspects of the Holocaust,...

    , Noam Chomsky
    Noam Chomsky
    Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

     and revisionism (French: Les Assassins de la mémoire, Le Seuil, 1995)
  • Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, Le Seuil, 1995
  • La solution finale dans l'histoire, with Arno Mayer, La Découverte, 2002

Other

  • Le trait empoisonné, La Découverte, 1993 (about Jean Moulin
    Jean Moulin
    Jean Moulin was a high-profile member of the French Resistance during World War II. He is remembered today as an emblem of the Resistance primarily due to his role in unifying the French resistance under de Gaulle and his courage and death at the hands of the Germans.-Before the war:Moulin was...

    )
  • “A Dangerous Game”. Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1994). New York: Telos Press.
  • Mémoires t.1 - La brisure et l’attente, 1930-1955, Le Seuil, 1998
  • Mémoires t.2 - Le trouble et la lumière, 1955-1998, Le Seuil, 1998

External links

  • Pierre Vidal-Naquet.net
  • Obituary (in English) or in French from L'Humanité
    L'Humanité
    L'Humanité , formerly the daily newspaper linked to the French Communist Party , was founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, a leader of the French Section of the Workers' International...

  • Obituary by Julian Jackson, The Guardian
    The Guardian
    The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

    , August 10, 2006
  • Paul Berman, “Denying the Deniers”, New York Times Magazine, December 31, 2006
  • NY Review of Books, a few manifestos and petition
    Petition
    A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer....

    s signed by Vidal-Naquet over the years
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