Robert Schnerb

Robert Schnerb (born December 20, 1900 in Dijon , † October 30, 1962 in Coudes ) was a French historian who dealt with the French Revolution , the Second Empire and economic history.

Life

Schnerb came from a Jewish family of merchants originally from Alsace. He studied in Paris with Albert Mathiez , obtained his licentiate in 1920, his diploma (Diplôme d'Etudes supérieures) on Bernard de Saintes (1751-1818, envoy of the National Convention in the French Revolution in the Côte d'Or) in 1921 and in 1923 at Competition of the Agrégation runner-up. He then taught at the Lycèe Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand . There he began to write his dissertation on the events of the French Revolution in the Puy-de-Dôme region near Mathiez. He dealt with the revolutionary events in the provinces (in addition to Puy-de-Dome also in Alsace and Bourgogne), which was new at the time and came close to the intentions of the Annales School around Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch . In Clermont-Ferrand he also made friends with Georges Lefèbvre . After Albert Mathiez's death in 1932, his dissertation was in danger. Although the Sorbonne professor Philippe Sagnac agreed to supervise them, he failed on the jury of historians who were supposed to judge them, despite the advocacy of Febvre and Lefebvre and the reputation that he had already earned through a series of articles on economic history would have.

In the 1930s he was also politically active against the fascists and secretary of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) in Clermont-Ferrand. From 1937 he taught in Sceaux for two years and then again in Clermont-Ferrand. During the Second World War he and his wife (married in 1928), who was also a history teacher, had to hide in the countryside because of the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime. After Clermont-Ferrand, meanwhile, the University of Strasbourg had exiled during the Second World War, including Marc Bloch and, as a student, the later pupil of Schnerb Jean Bouvier (1920–1987). After the war, to his disappointment, he did not receive a professorship at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and soon afterwards resigned from his post as a high school teacher and devoted himself to research. He was in contact with many historians, especially from the Annales School (he published a lot in their journal Annales) and wrote an overview of the 19th century that was translated into several foreign languages. After his death, his wife Madeleine Schnerb (née Liebschütz) took care of the publication of some works from the estate and in 1964 published a souvenir volume with unpublished articles.

He worked for the magazine L'Information historique.

Fonts

• The bourgeois age. Europe as a World Power 1815–1914, Kindler's Cultural History , 1971
  • French original: Le XIX siècle - l´apogee de l´expansion europénne (1815-1914) , Histoire générale des Civilizations, Presse Universitaire de France (PUF), 1955.
• Rouher et le Second Empire , Paris, A. Colin, 1949.
• Libre échange et protectionnisme , Que sais-je ?, PUF, Paris, 1963.
• with Jean Bouvier Deux siècles de fiscalité française, XIXe-XXe siècles: histoire, économie, politique , Mouton, 1973.

He also supported Henri Sée in his book Histoire économique de la France: les temps modern (1789-1914) , Paris, A. Colin 1951.

literature

• Claudine Hérody-Pierre Robert Schnerb, un historien dans le siècle 1900-1962, une vie autour d'une thèse , l'Harmattan, Paris, 2011.
• Pierre Léon Robert Schnerb, 1900-1962 , Annales 1964, No. 4, pp. 825-832.
• Madeleine Schnerb (Editor) Robert Schnerb , éditions Volcans, 1964.

Web links

• Biography of his granddaughter Claudine Hérody-Pierre
• Literature by and about Robert Schnerb in the catalog of the German National Library