Pierre Nora - Intellectual Life

Intellectual Life

In May 1980, Nora founded at Gallimard the review Le Débat with philosopher Marcel Gauchet; this quickly became one of the major French intellectual reviews. He had participated at the Saint-Simon Foundation, created in 1982 by François Furet and Pierre Rosanvallon and dissolved in 1999.

He opposed himself to the law of 23 February 2005 "supporting national recognition and national taxation in favour of French repatiations" and cosigned a petition in the daily Libération entitled "Liberté pour l'histoire". This law, at line 2 of article 4, was abrogated on 15 February 2006, establishing that research programmes must be accorded more importance in lieu of French overseas presence and that the programmes of study came to recognize the positive role.

Nora is equally well known for having directed Les Lieux de Mémoire, three volumes which gave as their point the work of enumerating the places and the objects in which are the incarnate national memory of the French.

Nora's book Les Français d'Algérie (The French of Algeria) (1961) has received scholarly criticism for its bias against French Algerians ("Pied Noirs") – a prejudice held by many French intellectuals of the time. Nora posited that the French Algerians (or settlers) were different from the French of the Metropol. His opinions were developed from his two years as a high school teacher in Algiers. "The French of Algeria" is described as synthesizing "a self-righteous anti-pied noir discourse". "The French of Algiers" is often held out as a scholarly work, but as David Prochaska, American historian of French Algeria points out, it is in fact "not based on original research and is devoid of the usual scholarly aparatus".