Louis Chevalier (historian)

Louis Chevalier (born March 29, 1911 in L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer , Département Vendée , † August 3, 2001 in Paris ) was a French social historian and local historian from Paris.

Chevalier attended the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, where he was a student of Émile Chartier ( Alain ). From 1932 he studied at the École normal supérieure (ENS), where he was a friend and fellow student of Georges Pompidou . After the Agrégation in 1938 he was a tutor at the ENS and taught at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, which in 1946 became the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), where Chevalier was professor. One of his students there was Édouard Balladur . In 1952 he became a professor at the Collège de France at the chair for history and social structures of Paris and the surrounding area.

In 1958, he published a study of the Parisian working class in the 19th century that revised many outdated views of historians. He also looked at the everyday life of the working class in Paris and its historical changes. His book about the assassination of Paris in 1977 became well-known, in which he complained about the transformation of the city from the end of the 1950s, which he linked to the governments of Charles de Gaulle and his minister of culture, André Malraux, as well as de Gaulle's successor Pompidou. It was less important to him that building complexes such as the Paris market halls disappeared than that of the cafés on Montmartre, for example (the history of which he wrote a book about), which for him were the bearers of Parisian culture.

In 1958 he became a knight, an officer in 1967 and commander of the Legion of Honor in 1977. In 1987 he received the Grand Prix of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques .

Fonts

• The problem of demographique north africain , PUF, 1947
• La Formation de la population parisienne au XIXè siècle , PUF, collection Travaux et documents / Institut national d'études démographique, 1949
• Demographie générale , éd. Dalloz, 1951
• Madagascar, population et ressources , PUF, collection Institut national d'études démographiques, Travaux et documents, 1952
• Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses , Plon, collection Civilizations d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, 1958, new edition Paris: Hachette 1978 (English translation Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes: In Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century , 2000)
• Les Parisiens , Hachette, 1967, 1985
• Histoire anachronique des Français , Paris: Plon, 1974 (received the Grand Prix Gobert )
• L'Assassinat de Paris , Calmann-Lévy, Collection Archives des sciences sociales, 1977, new edition Ivrea 1997 (English translation The Assassination of Paris , University Of Chicago Press, 1994)
• Montmartre du plaisir et du crime , collection Les Hommes et l'histoire, Robert Laffont, 1980
• Histoire de la nuit parisienne: 1940-1960 , Fayard, 1982
• Les Relais de mer. Un village de la côte vendéenne de la veille de la guerre de 14 aux lendemains de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale , Fayard, 1983
• Les Ruines de Subure: Montmartre, de 1939 aux années 80 , Paris, R. Laffont, 1985
• Juanito: Andalousie de boue et de sang , Paris, Stock, collection, Un Livre, une vie, 1990
• Splendeurs et misères du fait divers , Paris, Perrin, Collection Pour l'Histoire, 2003

Web links

• Obituary in the Guardian , Sept. 14, 2001