Biography
Jacques Soustelle was born in Montpellier in a Protestant working-class family. A very brilliant high school student, he was admitted at the first place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm, which is still the ultimate college within the French educational system (many Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists are among its alumni). At the age of 20, he was admitted at the first place at the competitive exam of agrégation de philosophie (high-level grade for teaching). An anti-fascist, he was general-secretary in 1935 of the French Union of Intellectuals against Fascism.
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“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
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