Anatole Abragam (1914-2011)
The master's son. In an autobiographical essay published in 1987 [1], a year after his election to the Collège de France in a chair entitled "Histoire de la France contemporaine", Maurice Agulhon summed up his childhood, spent not so much in a village, but in a school, the school of Pujaut, in the Gard region, where his parents were both primary school teachers. Both were solidly secular, voted left and were fervent pacifists. Both were Protestant and had a reserved, stern faith, but their family ancestry illustrated the Christian frontier that had divided Provençal France since the Protestant Reformation: the Huguenot Cévennes on his father's side, the Catholic Midi on his mother's, who had crossed the religious frontier.
"They didn't like history, I'm sure," writes Maurice Agulhon, recalling that for his pacifist parents, history was nothing more than the detestable tale of patriotic chauvinism, bloody wars and appalling violence. Yet it was history that he chose at the end of his studies, which took him from the Lycée Frédéric Mistral in Avignon, where he was a pupil from sixth form to the baccalauréat, to the preparatory classes at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, where he entered in 1943. When he passed the competitive entrance exam for the École normale supérieure in 1946, he decided to become a historian. This conviction was reinforced by the lectures given by Joseph Hours, the history teacher at the Lyons khâgne, a Christian Democrat and Resistance fighter, who introduced new themes from the Annales into his lectures, and instilled in his students, both inside and outside the classroom, a taste and respect for politics. It was to his memory that Maurice Agulhon dedicated his most famous work, Marianne au combat ; it was of him that he said in 1987 "that he is the historian who has most profoundly influenced the history I do today".
At the rue d'Ulm, Maurice Agulhon joined the Communist Party, and was active in the school's cell and in that of the 5th arrondissement. He remained a member of the Party until the end of 1960, when he began to question the reasons behind his disciplined and dedicated commitment. Those shared by many young people of his age, time and background, attracted by a party that claimed to be committed to the Resistance, the nation and republican democracy, and that demanded rigorous moral intransigence. The more secretive ones, stated as the search for a substitute family, once away, "liberated" writes Maurice Agulhon, from the protective but constraining affection of his parents.
The militant choice had its intellectual effects, making him prefer contemporary history as a field of research and Ernest Labrousse as a mentor, even though he was a member of the hated SFIO. But his history was economic and social, his references Marxist and his historiographical horizons wide open. So it was with Labrousse that, after passing the agrégation in 1950 and being appointed to the Lycée de Toulon and then to the Lycée Thiers in Marseille as a khâgne teacher, Maurice Agulhon submitted a thesis on the theme of republican tradition in Provence. The fashion for departmental history and the existence of dissertations already submitted on the Bouches-du-Rhône or the Var after 1851 forced him to reformulate the subject of his thesis, defended at the Sorbonne in 1969, as "Un mouvement populaire au temps de 1848: histoire des populations du Var dans la première moitié du 19th century " ("A popular movement at the time of 1848: a history of the people of the Var in the first half of the 19th century"). The rapporteur was Pierre Vilar, who had succeeded Ernest Labrousse, also a member of the thesis jury.
By this time, 1969, Maurice Agulhon had already written another thesis and introduced into the lexicon of historians a notion, that of "sociability", which remains attached to his work. After a three-year secondment to the CNRS, in 1957 he became Pierre Guiral's assistant at the Faculté des Lettres in Aix-en-Provence. Preoccupied with the question of why traditional Provence, both urban and rural, had easily become a breeding ground for republican democracy, he formulated the hypothesis that the liveliness of Provençal associative life had been the crucible of republican political preference. The associations, societies, circles and chambrées of the 19th century undoubtedly had ancient roots, which Maurice Agulhon traced back to the penitent brotherhoods of the Ancien Régime. A subtle prosopographical analysis enabled him to show that, in the course of the 18th century, the same men had passed from religious brotherhoods to Masonic lodges, which was a first way of thinking about the processes of secularization and transfers of sacredness that marked the Age of Enlightenment. The study was defended as a post-graduate thesis in Aix-en-Provence in 1966, and published by a small Aix publisher under the title La Sociabilité méridionale. It attracted the attention of André Latreille, then history columnist at Le Monde, and was republished two years later more prominently as Pénitents et francs-maçons de l'ancienne Provence. Essai sur la sociabilité méridionale, in a collection edited by François Furet and Denis Richet, published by Fayard. Daniel Roche, with whom I wrote this tribute, devoted a warm review to it in the Revue historique.
Maurice Agulhon took part in May '68 at the University of Aix-en-Provence, first as a lecturer, then as a senior lecturer and, after defending his doctoral thesis, as a professor. As head of the SNESup section, he campaigned for democratic reform of the university and, he adds, "to bring down the Gaullist government". This militancy did not affect his habitus, since, as he admits, "on those hot days, I always came to the faculty in a jacket and tie". Power did not fall, but the Faure Law democratized the university institution, and from then on Maurice Agulhon was an advocate of the new academic procedures.
This first period of his life came to an end with the fragmented publication of his great work, which gave rise to three books published in 1970 and 1971: Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique. Toulon de 1815 à 1851; La Vie sociale en Provence intérieure au lendemain de la Révolution and, the best-known of the three, La République au village. The work marked what Maurice Agulhon has called his "historiographical move", which took him from Labroussian history - that of prices, structures and conjunctures - to the exploration of the collective mind. It's no coincidence that the conclusions of La République au village end with a quotation from Michelet and an explicit reference to "cultural history". In 1972, Maurice Agulhon was elected professor at Paris I University. Now a Parisian, he became Marianne's historian.
Roger Chartier, November 2014.
***
