Marc Ferro

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Marc Ferro (2012)

Marc Roger Ferro (born December 24, 1924 in Paris , † April 21, 2021 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye ) was a French historian . Together with Jacques Le Goff , Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Pierre Nora, he was assigned to the third generation of the Annales School . He taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales . His research focused on the history of Russia and the USSR, as well as the history of film .

life and work

Marc Ferro was born in 1924 to immigrants in the affluent 8th arrondissement of Paris. His father was Jacques Ferro , a Corfu- born merchant of Greek - Italian descent, and his mother was Oudia Fridmann , model draftsman for a large fashion house and of Ukrainian - Jewish descent. His father died when he was five years old, so most of the time he grew up with his mother and her second husband. As a student at the Lycée Carnot , he was threatened by his Jewish mother during the occupation of France in World War II because of the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime . His philosophy teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty therefore advised him to leave the occupied northern France as soon as possible so that he continued his school education in Grenoble in the south of France. His mother was arrested in 1943, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered there. Ferro began studying history and geography in Grenoble. In 1944, in order to avoid being drafted into forced labor in Germany, the Service du travail obligatoire , he joined a resistance group led by the communist Annie Kriegel , where he was able to take on useful functions because of his knowledge of German. After this was discovered by the police, he fled the city and joined an armed group of the Maquis who fought in the mountains of the Vercors as part of the Resistance against the Vichy regime and the German occupiers. This group was also uncovered in July 1944, just a few days after Ferro's arrival and a few months before the arrival of the Allied troops. Ferro finally took part in the liberation of Lyon in September 1944 . Ferro then continued his studies and became a history teacher. In July 1948 he married Yvonne France Blondel (1920-2021).

From 1948 to 1956 he taught at the Lycée Lamoricière in Oran in what was then French Algeria . Due to the widespread racism among the European population and the brutal suppression of the independence movement by the colonial power (for example in the context of Toussaint rouge 1954), he was increasingly critical of colonialism and founded the Fraternité algérienne with colleagues, which failed to find a compromise solution between colonial rule and the violent war of independence of the FLN sought. In 1956 he left Algeria to become a high school teacher in Paris. He then taught at the renowned École polytechnique , before finally becoming directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

Marc Ferro saw himself as politically left throughout his life , without joining a party, and, unlike many colleagues, always kept his distance from the French Communist Party . In the context of the French presidential election in 2002 , he called for the election of Jean-Pierre Chevènement , in 2007 for the election of Ségolène Royal . Together with his colleagues Léon Poliakov and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, he fought against the theses of Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson , but at the same time protested against the political instrumentalization of history in the name of laws of memory ( loi mémorielles ) and was therefore a member of the Liberté pour l initiative 'histoire (freedom for history).

As one of the first historians in France, he dealt with the medium of film, long neglected by historical studies. The trigger in 1964 was his collaboration in an elaborate film project about the First World War , La Grande Guerre / 1914–1918 / The First World War , which was jointly supervised by German and French historians and was broadcast on television on the same day in the countries of the two former war opponents.

Between 1989 and 2001 he was first on the French broadcaster La Sept and from 1992 on Arte the presenter of the television program Histoire parallèle (German title: The week 50 years ago ). Together with a (often prominent) contemporary witness or a historian as a guest, he analyzed the reports of the weekly newsreel 50 years ago in 630 episodes .

Ferro died in April 2021 at the age of 96 from complications from COVID-19 .

Honors and memberships

Works (selection)

as an author

  • La Revolution de 1917 . Paris 1967.
  • La Grande Guerre, 1914-1918 . Paris 1968.
    • German translation: The Great War 1914–1918 . Frankfurt / M. 1988.
  • Cinema and History . Paris 1976.
  • L'Occident devant la révolution soviétique . Brussels 1980.
  • Suez . Brussels 1981.
  • Comment on raconte l'histoire aux enfants à travers le monde . Paris 1983.
    • German translation: Historical images. How the past is conveyed. Examples from all over the world . Frankfurt / M. 1991.
  • Pétain . Paris 1987 (reissued 1993 and 1994)
  • Les origines de la Perestroika . Paris 1990.
  • Nicolas II . Paris 1991.
    • German translation: Nicholas II the last tsar. A biography . Zurich 1991.
  • Le choc de l'Islam . Paris 2003.
  • Le Cinéma, une vision de l'histoire . Paris 2003.

as editor

  • Le livre noir du colonialisme . Paris 2003.

literature

  • Matthias Steinle: ARTE ahead of its time? Franco-German history television as part of the Elysée Treaty: “La Grande Guerre / 1914–1918 / The First World War” - a WDR-ORTF co-production (1964). In: Broadcasting and History . Vol. 31 (2006), No. 2, pp. 35-48.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Qui est qui en France. Lafitte, Paris 1997, p. 693.
  2. ↑ L'historien français Marc Ferro est mort , lemonde.fr, published and accessed on April 22, 2021.
  3. ^ Well-known French historian Marc Ferro died , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on April 22, 2021.
  4. ^ Membership directory: Marc Ferro. Academia Europaea, accessed on September 2, 2017 (English, with biographical and other information).
personal data
SURNAME Ferro, Marc
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ferro, Marc Roger (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Saint-Germain-en-Laye