Born on January 4 1914 in Provins, Jean-Pierre Vernant was orphaned by his father, a volunteer serviceman who died at the front in 1915, and by his mother in 1923. In 1931, he followed in his older brother's footsteps and went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne (licence in 1934, agrégation in 1937), while at the same time becoming a militant member of the Jeunesses Communistes, against a backdrop of regular violent confrontations with the fascist leagues. It was also during these years that he met Lida Nahimovich, his future wife, and befriended Ignace Meyerson.
Called up for military service in October 1937, he was mobilized for the " phoney war ". After the armistice in June 1940, he was appointed philosophy teacher at a high school in Toulouse. Rejecting the German-Soviet pact, Vernant distanced himself from the PCF and joined the Resistance, first editing leaflets with his brother, then joining the Libération movement in February 1942. A few months later, he became leader of the secret army in Haute-Garonne. In August 1944, " colonel Berthier " led the FFI in Haute-Garonne, liberating Toulouse from the occupying forces. He then led operations throughout the South-West until the autumn.
After the war, Vernant taught at a lycée and then joined the CNRS in 1948. He published his first articles on Ancient Greece. In 1958, he became director of studies at the EPHE, initially in the VIth section, that of economic and social sciences (which became the EHESS in 1975), before moving to theVe section, that of religious sciences in 1968. He published his first book, Les Origines de la pensée grecque, in 1962. In it, Vernant describes the conditions of emergence of rational thought in ancient Greece. The book, originally conceived in opposition to communist dogma, also challenged preconceived notions of the " Greek miracle " cherished by the majority of Hellenists at the time, who were quick to defend the exceptionality of Greek culture and its supposedly founding role in contemporary European culture.
In 1964, Vernant founded the Centre de recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes with a handful of colleagues convinced of the strangeness of the Greek world and the need to abandon the notion of heritage. Around Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Claude Mossé formed a team sometimes referred to as " l'École de Paris " (although the members of the center rejected this term), which proposed a completely innovative approach, inspired by Marxist philosophy and nourished by contact with other disciplines, in particular economics, sociology and anthropology.
Jean-Pierre Vernant was elected Professor at the Collège de France in 1975, with the support of Georges Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Caquot. One year after Jacqueline de Romilly, it was another Hellenist who entered the Collège to propose a study of ancient Greece in a manner singularly different from that of J. de Romilly.
For some ten years at the Collège de France, J.-P. Vernant worked essentially on religious questions, which undoubtedly enabled him more than any other to compare Greek documentation with that of other cultures, ancient or recent. In so doing, he established Greek studies firmly within the social sciences. By placing particular emphasis on festivals and rituals, he also restored the originality and strangeness of the ancient Greek world.
