Pierre Nora

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Pierre Nora

Pierre Nora (born November 17, 1931 in Paris ) is a French historian who is known, among other things, for his work on French identity and for his services in the social sciences . His name is often associated with the history of mentality as a discipline .

Life

Nora initially studied at the renowned Lycée Louis-le-Grand in the Latin Quarter in Paris , but then did not attend - as can often be read - the École normal supérieure . At the university he finally got a license in philosophy . After his Agrégation d'histoire , he worked as a high school teacher in Oran ( Algeria ) until 1960 . From 1977 he was director of studies at the Paris elite university for social sciences École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

At the same time, Pierre Nora was very successful and later also influential in the publishing industry , especially since he has been working for the renowned publisher Éditions Gallimard since 1965 . In 1980 he founded the magazine Le débat at Gallimard together with the philosopher Marcel Gauchet , which, following on from Les Temps Modernes, quickly became one of the most important intellectual magazines in France. In 2001 he was elected a member of the Académie française , to which he was solemnly accepted on June 6, 2002.

Nora is the son of a middle-class, non-practicing Jewish family. He himself claims to have “no religious feeling”.

Nora has lived with Anne Sinclair since 2013 .

In 2014 Nora was awarded the Dan David Prize .

plant

Pierre Nora is always critical of French history and the collective identity of the French. His idea of ​​the “lieu de mémoire” , the place of remembrance , gained importance , with which he connects the idea that the collective memory of a social group (for Nora usually the French nation) crystallizes in certain places. The term place is not to be understood geographically; In any case, such a place has a special symbolic power that has an identity-creating function for the respective group.

Excerpts from his seven-volume work Les Lieux de mémoire in 1990 under the title “Between History and Memory” appeared in German. The initiative for this translation came from the journalist and historian Ulrich Raulff and the publisher Klaus Wagenbach . Longer excerpts were published in 2005 under the title Memorial Places of France .

For years, Nora was one of the most influential historians in France, less because of his own works than because of his position as editor. He was responsible for the edition of some of the titles that are now regarded as groundbreaking, for example by Raymond Aron , Michel Foucault and Jacques Le Goff . He also took care of the translation of German-language authors such as Ernst Kantorowicz , Thomas Nipperdey and Karl Polanyi, who were previously largely unknown in France . Some of his decisions met with incomprehension, for example in the 1990s he refused to publish the French translation of Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Extremes" because of the author's Marxist orientation . The book was finally published by a Brussels publisher.

Publications

In French (excerpt)

  • Les Français d'Algérie (Julliard).
  • Vincent Auriol. Journal du Septennat 1947-1954 (Armand Colin).
  • Faire de l'histoire (Gallimard).
  • as editor and author of the foreword: Essais d'ego-histoire . Gallimard, Paris.
  • Les Lieux de mémoire (Gallimard).

In German language

  • (Ed.) Places of memory of France . Beck, 2005, ISBN 978-3-406-52207-9 .
  • Gaullists and Communists. In: ders. (Ed.): Places of memory of France. Munich 2005, pp. 214-252.
  • The Age of Remembrance. In: ders. (Ed.): Places of memory of France. Munich 2005, pp. 543-575.
  • (Ed.) Between history and memory. Fischer, 2001, ISBN 978-3-596-12295-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marie-Françoise Masson: Pierre Nora, une mémoire d'historien In: La Croix . April 23, 2010.
  2. ^ Anne Sinclair: direction le bonheur amoureux avec Pierre . femmeactuelle.fr. Accessed April 18, 2017 (French)
  3. ^ Places of memory in France, Munich 2005, p. 8.
personal data
SURNAME Nora, Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris