The Enlightenment specialist, professor emeritus at the Collège de France, died in Paris, February 19, at the age of 87 years.
by Jean Birnbaum
Great French Enlightenment specialist, Bravache and generous pedagogue, the historian Daniel Roche died in Paris, on February 19. He was 87 years old.
He whose texts gave the modern era in motion, studying the boom in the trip to show that ancient societies were far from immobile, ultimately moved. Until the end, he remained faithful to this Paris where he was born on July 26, 1935 and of which he described the popular classes, as evidenced Ménétra (Montalba, 1982).
Since the disappearance of his wife, the art historian Fanette Roche-Pézard (1924-2009), to which he dedicated his works, Daniel Roche lived alone, surrounded by archives and books, in his Apartment located a stone’s throw from the Grande Mosque. He received his former students in a living room where an imposing Prussian saddle was enthroned. The object, of which he had acquired the fleas, testified to his passion for this equestrian culture to which he devoted a dizzying trilogy (the engine horse, the glory and the power, knowledge and passion, Fayard, 2008, 2011 and 2015).
riding horse
There was a form of family continuity here: his father, a civil servant in the administration, had made his arms, and the Great War, in the cavalry. But the young Daniel, who had emerged in a modest environment, had hardly had the opportunity to ride a horse until his entrance to the École normale supérieure, after a preparatory class at the Chaptal high school. “At the School, we had to play sports, and then discovered that we could also make horse, at the expense of the state, he remembered, laughing. This is how I started To be assembled, in the magnificent merry -go -round of the French riding society, in the Bois de Boulogne. “For years later, he was going to make horse one of the great universal symbols of Europe as a space for exchange and traffic.
This momentum is part of a way of doing things, a historiographical tradition with which the name of Daniel Roche will remain associated: that which he called, with others, in the late 1970s, “the history of material culture “. It was a question of renewing our gaze by reconciling economic history and history of daily life: there is no ideas on one side and on the other practices; We must study together philosophical values and ordinary gestures, great subjects and small objects. This is what will have ceased to assert this tireless researcher, who enlightened the tensions of modernity and the contradictions of progress by taking an interest in clothing (La Culture des Appances, Fayard, 1989), in the book (The Republicans of Letters, Fayard, 1988), as in housing, heating or food (history of banal things, Fayard, 1997).
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