Death of Pierre Nora, historian of memory, at the age of 93

The editor and historian Pierre Nora, who died on Monday at the age of 93, was the mastermind behind the monumental work Les lieux de mémoire , an exploration of our collective heritage in nearly 5,000 pages that marked a key stage in French historiography.

A pillar of Gallimard and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), this winner of the 1993 Grand Prix National d'Histoire was elected to the Académie Française in 2001.

Pierre Nora, who later shared the life of journalist Anne Sinclair , was also director of the magazine Le Débat and a founding member of the influential Saint-Simon Foundation, a group dissolved in 1999 which aimed to reconcile the economic and social world with political circles.

In 1984, La République was published, the first of three volumes of Lieux de mémoire , an expression which has since entered everyday language. This was followed by La nation in 1986 and Les France , whether political, social or religious, in 1992.

In total, 4,760 pages written by a hundred historians, the best in their field, including Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Marc Fumaroli , who have profoundly transformed the French intellectual landscape.

"I wanted to study national memory and, rather than making generalizations, it seemed more exciting to me to study the places (emblems, symbols, museums, archives, institutions etc.) where it was condensed and expressed," he explained in 1984. "This had not been done or was scattered. Nothing, or not much, on the Marseillaise, on town halls, on war memorials... There was a gap, a sort of blind spot in a history that had not looked at itself," he added.

Pierre Nora has brought to light "a new object of history" , summarized the historian René Rémond, regarding this collection which deals with the Pantheon, the Tour de France, the Civil Code, the Larousse encyclopedia, the funeral of Victor Hugo, Khâgne, the forest and even the vine.

For the first time, the commemorative phenomenon was dealt with in depth.

Born on November 17, 1931 in Paris, Pierre Nora came from a family of the Parisian Jewish upper middle class. Having obtained a history degree in 1958, he left in the midst of the Algerian War to teach in Oran, from where he brought back in 1960 an essay on collective psychology, The French in Algeria .

From 1966, he headed the history and human sciences department at Gallimard, where he successively created the collections "Bibliothèque des sciences humaines" , "Témoins" and "Bibliothèque des histoires" . He stayed there for 57 years, a record of which he wanted to leave in Une étrange obstination (2022).

In 1971, he directed with Jacques Le Goff the publication of "Making History" , a three-volume investigation into civilization in its most everyday manifestations (cooking), the most intimate (the body), individual or collective (celebration), shaped by the evolution of techniques, customs or the environment.

From 1974 to 1980, he published in seven volumes, co-edited with Jacques Ozouf, the scholarly critical edition of Vincent Auriol's journal. Subsequently, he devoted himself to the development of Lieux de mémoire .

In 2007, he became president of the association "Freedom for History," which defends historians' freedom of expression against political intervention. "It is not up to the judge or the legislator to tell History," he stated.

Pierre Nora, who was married to art historian and museum curator Françoise Cachin, who died in 2011, was the brother of Simon Nora, who died in 2006, a senior civil servant and former director of the ENA.

In "Jeunesse" , an autobiography published in 2021, the academic drew up a catalogue of his "failures" which he considered providential, for the benefit of Elphège, his only son, a biologist, whom he did not raise.