Francois Furet

THE PATHWAYS OF MELANCOLYFrançois Furet François Furet (1927-1997) was not only a well published historian but also a man committed to politics in his time, a dedicated academic and a journalist, in short one of the intellectual figures who most closely represented the second half of the Twentieth Century. The inextricably intertwined aspects of his life make his biography a peerless document in helping us understand that century. The true heart of his career was the history of the French Revolution, and he revolutionised our understanding of it in 1978 ( Penser la Révolution française), before going on to write the most significant book about the illusion of Communism ( Le Passé d'une illusion). But his interest in the phenomenon of revolution is also dictated by his personal journey, given that he was a member of the French Communist party from 1947 to 1959. Like many intellectuals of his generation he left after Budapest, but he remained fascinated by belief - in the quasi religious sense of the word - in the myth of the Grand Soir. He was part of the Unified Socialist Party adventure in 1960, an advisor to Edgar Faure after the upheavals of 1968, and a journalist for France-Observateur and then the Nouvel Observateur until he died. Lastly, he was chairman of the EHESS School of social sciences and he set up the Saint-Simon Foundation, a key French think-tank of the 1980s and 90s. At the end of his life it was said that this left-winger and staunch supporter of Michel Rocard had fallen to the right. When he proved particularly sensitive to Judaism and related issues he was accused of revisionism because he had had conversations with the German historian Ernst Nolte. One of the premises of this book is to demonstrate that he was no such thing, and that he remained what he had always been: a left-winger who could criticise those whom saw as "his family." Christophe Prochasson, Director of Studies at the EHESS, has written many books on the history of left-wing politics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. In 2010, he published La gauche est-elle morale ? (Flammarion).