Pierre Nora

Pierre Charles Nora (17 November 1931 – 2 June 2025) was a French historian elected to the Académie Française on 7 June 2001. As editor at Éditions Gallimard, he established the Library of Social Sciences in 1966 and the Library of Histories in 1970. He was director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences from 1977 for four decades. Nora is known for having directed Les Lieux de Mémoire, four volumes focused on places and objects of remembrance which incarnate the national memory of the French, writing a new history (nouvelle histoire).

Nora was born in Paris on 17 November 1931, the youngest son of four children – the others were Simon, Jean and Jacqueline – born to Gaston Nora, a prominent Parisian urologist, and his wife, Julie Lehman. During the war, he became acquainted with intellectuals Jean Prévost and Jean Beaufret, who was to become a major figure in the introduction of Heidegger's philosophy to France. In the 1950s, together with Jacques Derrida, he took hypokhâgne and khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand but, contrary to popular belief, he thrice failed to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure. This setback, which he shared with his school-mate Pierre Vidal-Naquet, was one which Nora came to regard as a stroke of luck, particularly in terms of the example set by another friend, Jean-François Revel, since it made him believe he was led to live a far more interesting life than would otherwise have been the case, contrasting his own situation with that of Gérard Granel. Around this time, the poet René Char came to play an important role in his formation. Through him Nora met his first love, Madagascan Marthe Cazal (1907–1983), a major model for the figure of Justine in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Thereafter, he obtained a licence de lettres (equivalent to the Bachelor of Arts) degree in philosophy. He passed the agrégation d'histoire in 1958.

Nora taught at the Lycée Lamoricière d'Oran in Algeria from 1958 until 1960. He wrote a book about his experiences, published under the title Les Français d'Algérie ("The French of Algeria") (1961). In 1962, when the Évian peace treaty was signed – later confirmed by a subsequent referendum – which ended the Algerian War, a ceasefire came into effect. Nora, despite not knowing a word of Hebrew was asked to travel there and both look into the situation of Algerian Jews and secure their archives for repatriation. He met Ben Bella who, embracing him, asked Nora to sit by his side as his motorcade drove into Algiers the following day. Ben Bella was under the impression that Nora, whose account of Algeria he had read with admiration while in prison, was a member of the local Algerian Jewish community. During the same May week, he was stopped with several others by a group of insurgents and stood against a wall for execution, a fate avoided by the timely intervention of the local police. ...