Marcel Mauss was born on May 10 1872 into a Jewish family from Épinal. He was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, who greatly influenced him. In 1890, rather than attending the École normale supérieure, he chose to follow his uncle's lectures at the University of Bordeaux. There, he became close to socialist movements and joined the French Workers' Party in 1894. After passing the agrégation in philosophy (1895), he continued his studies at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) and began work on religious phenomena. A trip to the Netherlands and especially England to prepare a thesis on the origins of prayer (1898) brought him into contact with Max Müller and James Frazer, whom Mauss associated with the " English school of religious anthropology ".

As soon as Durkheim founded L'Année sociologique in 1896, Mauss took an active part in the journal, publishing reviews - up to several dozen a year. His first works were regularly written by four hands, with Durkheim and Henri Hubert, among others. He was also an active Dreyfusard, socialist and cooperative activist. He was elected lecturer at the EPHE in 1901, then deputy director of studies in 1913.

Mauss volunteered for service in September 1914, attached as an interpreter to a British and then Australian division, and mobilized to the front, where he was praised by his superiors for his front-line commitment. He was demobilized in January 1919. Several figures from the French school of sociology were among the millions killed in the First World War. Durkheim himself died in 1917 and, after the war, Mauss became the guardian of his method, inheriting his uncle's unpublished or unfinished work. In 1923, with the help of many Durkheimians, Mauss relaunched L'Année sociologique, which had been suspended since the start of the war. In the very first issue of this new series, he published theEssai sur le don, one of his most famous works. In it, he introduced the notion of " total social fact ", one of his most influential concepts. In 1925, Mauss and L. Lévy-Bruhl founded the Institut d'ethnologie.

Mauss was appointed full professor of sociology at the Collège de France on February 3 1931, having been elected by the Assembly of Professors at the end of November 1930 on the nomination of Antoine Meillet. This was his third attempt, following an unsuccessful bid in 1909 and an unsuccessful procedure the year before his election. For ten years, he used his lectures at the Collège de France to edit and publish unpublished works by Durkheim and Durkheimians, while at the same time developing his personal work, , with the aim of discovering rational structures behind social phenomena (sacrifice, prayer, giving, bodily techniques, etc.).

Mauss retired in autumn 1940, to avoid exposing the institutions where he worked to anti-Semitic repression. The war was particularly hard on him, with his wife ill and bedridden. His apartment was confiscated by the occupying forces in August 1942. He managed to save his library before moving into a small, unsanitary apartment. Many of his Jewish and Resistance colleagues and friends were deported and murdered, including Maurice Halbwachs, who was elected to the Collège de France in May 1944, shortly before being deported to Buchenwald. He was reinstated at the Collège de France on November 21 1944 and appointed Honorary Professor in February 1945. Weakened by the ordeal of war, Marcel Mauss died at home on February 11 1950.