Tribute to Maurice Agulhon (1926-2014)

Abstract

The school teacher’s son. This was how, in an autobiographical essay published in 1987, a year after his election at the College de France to the History of Contemporary France Chair, Maurice Agulhon summed up his childhood – a childhood which he had spent not so much in a village as in a school, that of Pujaut, in the Gard, where his parents were both teachers. Both were staunchly secular, left-wing and fervent pacifists. Both were protestant and had a private and strict faith. Their family...