Pierre Nora

Pierre Nora (pjɛʁ nɔʁa; born 17 November 1931) is a French historian elected to the Académie française on 7 June 2001. He is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history. He is the brother of the late Simon Nora, a former senior French administrative professional. Nora is the last son of four children – the others were Simon, Jean and Jacqueline – born to Gaston Nora, a prominent Parisian urologist, and his wife, Julie Lehman. During the war, he came to know the writer Jean Prévost and Jean Beaufret, who was to become a major figure in the introduction of Heidegger's philosophy to France. In the 1950s, together with Jacques Derrida, he took hypokhâgne and khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand but, contrary to a persistent legend, he failed three times to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure. This setback, which he shared with his school-mate Pierre Vidal-Naquet, was one which Nora came to regard as a stroke of luck, particularly in terms of the example set by another friend, Jean-François Revel, since it led him to live a far more interesting life than would otherwise have been the case, contrasting his own situation with that of Gérard Granel. Around this time, the poet René Char came to play an important role in his formation. Through him Nora met his first love, the Madagascan Marthe Cazal (1907-1983), a major model for the figure of Justine in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Thereafter, he obtained a licence de lettres (equivalent to the Bachelor of Arts) degree in philosophy. He passed the agrégation d'histoire in 1958. He was a teacher at the Lycée Lamoricière d'Oran in Algeria from 1958 until 1960. He wrote a book about his experiences, published under the title Les Français d'Algérie ("The French of Algeria") (1961). In 1962, when the Évian peace treaty was signed – later confirmed by a subsequent referendum – which ended the Algerian War, a ceasefire came into effect.