Death of Pierre Nora, a life for memory – Liberation

He dreamed of becoming a great writer, he was a great publisher, elected to the French Academy. As he notes himself in Youththe first volume of his autobiography which he refused to qualify as Memoirsbelieving the term too solemn, Pierre Nora was gifted to enter « In the logic of others, which (there) is born to assert (s) ». This charming man with a blue gaze, with a rocky and warm voice, funny, ironic and extremely urban but capable, it seems, of scathing replicas, presented himself as a quirky intellectual, giving « Priority to ear and eye » rather than action. However, in his own way, Pierre Nora was an actor: pillar of the humanities in France between the 1960s and 90s, he changed the way in which we write history thanks in particular to the three volumes of Memory placesof which he was the instigator and the coordinator; Thanks also to the exercise of ego-history, to which he has engaged, not contenting himself with inventing the expression, by being historian of himself in his work, among others in Youth,, A strange obstinacy And Public historian. Contemporary with the return of the subject, after his erasure in the 1950s (a change that the historian explained by attachment to the figure of the pro man