Maurice Halbwachs was born onMarch 11 1877. A French sociologist and disciple of Émile Durkheim, he is the author of Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, his major work on what Maurice Halbwachs referred to as " la mémoire collective ". A universal activist, he has worked to " create the conditions for understanding and tolerance between peoples separated by history ".
After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure in 1898, he was awarded an agrégation in philosophy in 1901, a doctorate in law in 1909 (his law thesis was used by the Socialist Party to produce a propaganda brochure against capitalist speculation) and a doctorate in literature in 1913. After teaching for almost a year, he resumed his law studies and began to study German political economy. In 1909, on a trip to Berlin, he caused a minor political scandal when he wrote an article for the newspaper L'Humanité reporting on police repression of a strike, which led to his expulsion from Germany. A few years later, Maurice Halbwachs, a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Henri-Poincaré, was drafted into the Ministry of Armaments from May 1915 to October 1917. A lecturer in philosophy at Caen, he was appointed professor of sociology at the Faculty of Strasbourg in 1919. There, he rubbed shoulders with historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, psychologist Marc Blondel and mathematician Maurice Fréchet, with whom he wrote Le Calcul des probabilités à la portée de tous, published in 1924. In 1930, he took part in the third university lecture in Davos and, while visiting professor at the University of Chicago, met the sociologists behind the Chicago School, Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess. In 1935, Maurice Halbwachs was awarded a chair at the Sorbonne, where he taught social economics, the methodology and logic of science and sociology. In 1938, he was appointed President of the French Institute of Sociology.
As early as 1938, Maurice Halbwachs took in Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Austria fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1940, he joined the Thermopyles intelligence network. OnMay10 1944, he was elected to the Collective Psychologychairat the Collège de France. Events prevented him from giving either his opening lecture or his teaching. Arrested by the Gestapo in July of the same year, he was deported to Buchenwald. He was first hospitalized in August 1944, then a second time in January 1945, before passing away onMarch16 1945.
His research led to the publication of numerous books and articles on statistics and collective psychology, including Les Origines du sentiment religieux d'après Durkheim, Esquisse d'une psychologie des classes sociales, La Mémoire collective and La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte, étude de mémoire collective.
One of the amphitheaters on the Marcelin Berthelot site of the Collège de France is named in honor of Maurice Halbwachs.