Pierre Vidal-Naquet - Biography

Biography

Vidal-Naquet’s family belonged to the Sephardic Jewish community rooted in the Comtat Venaissin (Carpentras, Avignon). He was born in Paris, and he was raised in bourgeois, Republican and secular environment. His father Lucien was a lawyer, of “Dreyfusard” temperament, who quickly entered the Resistance in order to avoid exile. In June 1940, the family moved to Marseille. Arrested by the Gestapo on 15 May 1944, Vidal-Naquet’s father was deported, along with his wife, in June 1944. They were sent to Auschwitz, where they died. At 14 years old, Pierre Vidal-Naquet then hid in his grandmother’s house in the Drôme. There, he read a lot, including the Iliad, and came to know his cousin, the philosopher Jacques Brunschwig. He later learnt that the Nazis had made “his father dance,” something he would never forget.

After his studies at the lycée Carnot in Paris, he specialized in the history of Ancient Greece, as well as in contemporary subjects such as the Algerian War (1954–1962) and the Holocaust. He read Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, a book attempting to explain the causes of the defeat during the 1940 Battle of France, which is one of the origins of his vocation as a historian. He discovered surrealism (André Breton, René Char and also Antonin Artaud), and founded a review at 18 years old, along with Pierre Nora, Imprudence. The 1949 Rajk trial definitively took out his will to adhere to the French Communist Party (PCF).

Pierre Vidal-Naquet first taught history at Orléans’s high school (1955), before going to Caen’s university (1956–60) and then Lille (1961–62). Reading Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss, he would become a member of the “Paris School”, originally composed of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Nicole Loraux, Marcel Detienne and himself. Their work would renew approaches to the study of Ancient Greece.

He then worked at the CNRS (1962–64) and was named maître de conférences at the University of Lyon (1964–66). He was then named professor at the École pratique des hautes études, which became the EHESS.

Vidal-Naquet co-authored several books with Jean-Pierre Vernant, with whom he was friends. However, although Vernant was a “comrade” of the French Communist Party (PCF), Vidal-Naquet never belonged to any political party, with the exception of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), which he considered a “mere discussion circle.”

Pierre Vidal-Naquet was married and the father of three children. He was also officer of the Légion d'honneur and, in Greece, commander of the Phenix Order.