Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Summary
Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet (vidal nakɛ; 23 July 1930 – 29 July 2006) was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1969.
Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested (and deeply involved) in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War (1954–62), during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army, as well as Jewish history. He participated with Michel Foucault and Jean-Marie Domenach in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP), which was one of the first French new social movements. He was part of debates over historiography in which he criticized negationism, and he was a supporter of . To the end of his life, Vidal-Naquet never abandoned his fascination with Antiquity.
Vidal-Naquet's family belonged to the Sephardic Jewish community rooted in the Comtat Venaissin (Carpentras, Avignon). He was born in Paris, and he was raised in bourgeois, Republican and secular environment. His father Lucien was a lawyer, of "Dreyfusard" temperament, who quickly entered the Resistance in order to avoid exile. In June 1940, the family moved to Marseille. Arrested by the Gestapo on 15 May 1944, Vidal-Naquet's father was deported, along with his wife, in June 1944. They were sent to Auschwitz, where they died. At 14 years old, Pierre Vidal-Naquet then hid in his grandmother's house in the Drôme. There, he read a lot, including the Iliad, and came to know his cousin, the philosopher Jacques Brunschwig. He later learnt that the Nazis had made "his father dance," something he would never forget.
After his studies at the lycée Carnot in Paris, he specialized in the history of Ancient Greece, as well as in contemporary subjects such as the Algerian War (1954–1962) and the Holocaust. He read Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, a book attempting to explain the causes of the defeat during the 1940 Battle of France, which is one of the origins of his vocation as a historian.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.