Lucien mr

Lucien Herr (born January 17, 1864 in Altkirch , Département Haut-Rhin ; † May 18, 1926 in Paris ) was a librarian at the École normal supérieure in Paris and a well-known socialist intellectual at the time of the Third Republic in France.

Life

Mr. graduated from the École normal supérieure in 1886 with an agrégation in philosophy. He then successfully applied for the position of librarian at the university. He held this position from 1888 until the end of his life.

In the wake of the so-called Boulanger crisis , Herr joined reformist socialist groups, first in 1889 with the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes (FTSF) , and later with the Parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire (POSR) . They had impressed him in the face of an impending overthrow by advocating the republic combined with the threat of a general strike . At this time, Mr. is said to have converted the initially moderate republican Jean Jaurès to socialism.

On the occasion of the Dreyfus affair , Herr dealt with the “anti-Dreyfusard” Maurice Barrès in the Revue blanche of February 15, 1898 : because his family had decided to emigrate to France after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to the German Empire , he also claimed for himself to be an "uprooted one". Herr also ensured a meeting of the intellectual "Dreyfusards" Émile Zola , Georges Clemenceau , Jean Jaurès , Bernard Lazare , Auguste Scheurer-Kestner and Charles Péguy . He organized a petition in favor of Captain Dreyfus, which was published in Le Temps on January 15, 1898 , and was one of the founders of the League for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights in 1898 , of which he was a member until his death.

In 1904, Lucien Herr was one of the co-founders and namesake of the daily newspaper l'Humanité . His committed work in the Groupe de l'unité socialiste (= group of socialist unity) helped create the conditions for the establishment of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) in April 1905 on the occasion of the Congrès du Globe in Paris. Finally, at the Congress of Tours in 1920, which ended with the split in the SFIO and the creation of the Parti communiste français (PCF) , Mr was one of the speechwriters for the final declaration by Léon Blum , from which there is great dejection at the split in a movement, to the unification of which Mr. himself had contributed so much.

The staunch pacifist was deeply shocked by the outbreak of war in 1914. After the First World War , Herr was involved in re-establishing the intellectual exchange with Germany, and from 1920 he was commissioned to negotiate in Berlin about resuming supplies to the French libraries.

effect

As a good expert on political philosophy in general and German culture in particular, Lucien Herr was known the works of Fichte , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , but also the writings of Proudhon and the early French socialists . He worked for a long time on a book about Hegel , but he never finished it. He had a reputation for not only reading and remembering everything, but also knowing the latest literature on every issue in every language. He used his knowledge and his outstanding position at one of the most important schools in France to advance his ideas about socialism and human rights , especially with the numerous students whom he guided in their library research. Through his mediation, several generations of leading French socialists discovered the classic authors of socialism. Since some of his students later made important university careers or played an important role in political life, he was considered a kind of Gray Eminence of the Third Republic.

Appreciations

• Charles Péguy : Il fut un des maîtres de notre jeunesse, certainement le plus pur et le plus ardent.
• Paul Nizan : En 1924, il y avait encore un homme: c'était Lucien Herr. Quand on voyait ce géant penché sur une colline de livres, ces yeux sans brouillard au pied d'un front bossué, d'une sévère falaise de pensées, lorsqu'on entendait sa voix qui ne mentait jamais énoncer des jugements qui ne voulaient que cette fin just: rendre à chacun ce qui lui revient, on savait qu'il n'était pas périlleux de vivre dans cette demeure crasseuse.
• Léon Blum : Ce fut Herr qui cristallisa toutes les tendances diffuses qui étaient en moi et c'est à lui que je dois d'avoir opéré une “réorientation profonde” de ma conception individualiste et anarchique du Socialisme.

In 1927, Place Lucien-Herr was named after him in the 5th arrondissement of Paris near the École normal supérieure . The collège in Herr's birthplace Altkirch bears his name.

Publications

• Choix d'écrits . Rieder, Paris 1932.

Translations:

• Goethe-Schiller. Correspondance 1794-1805. Traduite d'après l'édition définitive allemande et précédée d'une introduction par Lucien Herr . Plon, Paris 1923.

literature

• Charles Andler : Vie de Lucien Herr . Rieder, Paris 1932 (reprinted by Maspéro, Paris 1977)
• Daniel Lindenberg, Pierre André Meyer: Lucien Herr, le socialisme et son destin . Callman-Levy, Paris 1977. ISBN 2-7021-0234-4 .
• Pierre Petitmengin: Lucien Herr et l'École Normale. Exposition 10 juin - 15 juin 1977 . Bibliothèque de L'École Normale Supérieure, Paris 1977.
• Robert Minder : Médiateurs alsaciens à Paris. De Charles Andler, Henri Lichtenberger et Lucien Herr à Albert Schweitzer . In: Jürgen Olbert (Ed.): Le Colloque de Strasbourg 1977. The first meeting of German French teachers and French German teachers . Diesterweg, Frankfurt / M. 1977; Pp. 102-115. ISBN 3-425-04235-1 .
• Antoinette Blum (ed.): Correspondance entre Charles Andler et Lucien Herr: 1891-1926 . Presses de l'École normal supérieure, Paris 1992. ISBN 2-7288-0180-0 .
• Anne Alter, Philippe Testard-Vaillant: Guide du Paris Savant . Belin, Paris 1997. ISBN 2-7011-2038-1 .

Web links

• Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) , Contemporary History Archive: Fonds d'archives Lucien-Herr (last checked on September 17, 2015)
• Collège Lucien Herr in Altkirch, Département Haut-Rhin (last checked on February 13, 2011)

References and comments

1. ^ Charles Andler, Vie de Lucien Herr , Rieder, Paris 1932
2. ↑ an allusion to the title and content of Les Déracinés (= The Uprooted), the first volume of Barrès' nationalist novel trilogy Le Roman de l'énergie nationale , published in 1897 . The text of this book is available at Gallica. Bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France : Les déracinés (last checked on February 13, 2011)
3. ^ ^{A b} Joel Colton: Léon Blum . Fayard, Paris 1966, p. 31
4. ↑ " He was one of the teachers of our youth, and certainly the purest and most ardent. "
5. ↑ Aden Arabie . Rieder, Paris 1931; in German ed. u. trans. v. Traugott King Aden Arabie . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1969
6. ↑ accordingly: It was Herr who worked out all the confused tendencies that were present in me and I owe to him a comprehensive reorientation of my individualistic and anarchistic ideas of socialism.