Dosse, François Pierre Nora - homo historicus

Abstract

As part of the genre of ‘intellectual biography’ of French authors who marked the second half of the twentieth century (Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari), Francois Dosse has written an extensive work on Pierre Nora. A singular figure in the French intellectual space, this author looks in a discrete and silent manner at different domains of production and diffusion (literature, journalism, publishing and essays) during the last 50 years. Known by historians as one of the coordinators (with Jacques Le Goff) of ‘Doing History’ and the idealizer of ‘sites of memory,’ Pierre Nora is above all seen as the editor of maison Gallimard and the creator of the famous ‘Bibliotheque des sciences humaines.’ In this collection the ‘cream’ of the French and foreign intelligentsia (Michel Foucault, Georges Dumezil, Emile Benveniste, amongst so many others) promoted in the 1960s and 1970s “the golden years of the human sciences.” A university professor (assistant professor in Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Institut d’Etudes Politiques during the 1970s and 1980s), idealizer of different collections of human sciences (initially in Julliard publishers afterwards in Gallimard), the founder in 1980 (with Marcel Gauchet) of the journal Le Debat (an important intellectual media anchored on the critique of ideas and the analysis of current events), and an immortal (having been elected to the Academie Francaise in 2002), Pierre Nora still plays a leading roles in the current debates of the Cite (the public sphere) notably in relation to the imbroglios of memory, history and French heritage. Nevertheless, author of a single book, published during the Algerian war, Les Francais d’Algerie, and of numerous articles (never put together in a single collection) about the history of the present and the epistemology of history, Pierre Nora incarnated the solitary intellectual, the talented writer who