Eugen Weber, Authority On Modern France, 82
DGH
Eugen Weber, Authority on Modern France, Dies at 82
By ANDREW L. YARROW [New York Times]
Eugen Weber, the Romanian-born, English-educated American historian
who was one of the world's foremost interpreters of modern France and
an authority on modern Europe, died Thursday [May 17, 2007] at his
home in Los Angeles [California], where he had taught at U.C.L.A.
[University of California at Los Angeles] and was a former dean of its
College of Letters and Science. He was 82.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said.
Mr. Weber's accessible style made him popular among students,
historians and the public in the United States as well as in France,
where his books on modern French history are considered classics. Over
the years, hundreds of thousands of students got their first taste of
modern European history from Mr. Weber's best-selling textbooks like
"A Modern History of Europe" (1971) and "Europe Since 1715: A Modern
History" (1972).
And he was a familiar, charming presence to Americans who saw his
acclaimed 52-part lecture series, "The Western Tradition," produced by
WGBH in Boston [Massachusetts] for public television in 1989. It
became the basis of a video instructional series with companion books
that students have used ever since.
Mr. Weber wrote about French history and taught it in the United
States for more than 40 years. He published more than a dozen
distinguished books, which have been translated into more than half a
dozen languages. He was a professor of modern European history at the
University of California at Los Angeles, and his classes were so
popular that he became a campus celebrity. A chair there was endowed
in his name.
Mr. Weber was encyclopedic in his depiction of an era, a movement or a
social trend, focusing more on the many facets of everyday life than
on historical theories. History, he wrote in "Europe Since 1715," was
"not just the epic of collective deeds, but the tissue of the times;
not just what happened, but to whom and how; not just wars and
politics, the doings of a relatively restricted group, but the way
people lived - humbler and middling people, and the rich as well -
their food, their housing, the warp and woof of their existence."
Mr. Weber's work was admired in the country that so fascinated him.
Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University and a leading
writer on French history, once observed:
"On the whole, the French write their own history and write it with
much sophistication. But occasionally they come across a foreigner who
does it differently or better, and then, with much fanfare and
generosity, they adopt him for their own. Such is the case of Eugen
Weber."
At least two of Mr. Weber's works have become standard reading in
France: "Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century
France" (1962), a history of the royalist movement, which dominated
the French right from the Dreyfus Affair until 1940; and "Peasants
Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914" (1976),
an account of how a country that was still largely rural, "inhabited
by savages" and a hodgepodge of cultures was transformed in the half-
century after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
Mr. Weber maintained that before the 20th century, France was largely
"a Parisian political project rather than a national reality." Modern
French identity, he said, was a relatively recent creation, a product
of mass education, conscription and the coming of modern
communications. After "Peasants" was published, Mr. Judt said, Mr.
Weber's thesis became the new orthodoxy.
Several of Mr. Weber's books explored the development of right-wing
nationalism in Europe. To Mr. Weber, nationalism had changed from a
humanitarian, Enlightenment-based movement in the early 19th century
into an angry, "tribal" and "exclusivist" movement in the 20th
century. Despite its affinities with the historic right, the virulent,
xenophobic and radical nationalism of the 20th century, he concluded,
was statist and anti-individualistic.
In "The Nationalist Revival in France: 1905-1914," published in 1959,
Mr. Weber traced French right-wing nationalism from its royalist roots
during the Third Republic beginning in the 1870s to the fascism of the
Vichy regime in World War II.
Mr. Weber took a pragmatic approach to history. "Nothing is more
concrete than history, nothing less interested in theories or in
abstract ideas," he once wrote. "The great historians have fewer ideas
about history than amateurs do; they merely have a way of ordering
their facts to tell their story. It isn't theories they look for, but
information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle them."
Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest, Romania, on April 24, 1925,
the son of Sonia and Emmanuel Weber, an industrialist. At age 12, he
was sent to boarding school in Herne Bay, in southeastern England, and
later to Ashville College in the Lake District.
After graduating in 1943, he joined the British Army and was stationed
in Belgium, India and occupied Germany. He rose to captain in the
King's Own Scottish Borderers, one of Britain's oldest regiments.
After his service ended in 1947, he attended Cambridge.
While at Cambridge, Mr. Weber spent two yearlong interludes in Paris,
studying at the Institut d'Études Politiques and teaching English at
the suburban Lycée Lakanal. He fell for France, he said, "just as one
falls into love."
While in London he met Jacqueline Brument, who was taking classes in
art history. They married in 1950. Mr. Weber always said that he wrote
for his wife, who is his only immediate survivor.
Mr. Weber spent a year as a visiting lecturer at U.C.L.A. and decided
in 1954 to move permanently to North America. He taught at the
University of Alberta in Edmonton and the University of Iowa before
rejoining the U.C.L.A. faculty in 1956. The move began a tenure that
was to last the rest of his life, interrupted only by visiting
professorships and other academic work in France and the United
States.
Mr. Weber helped to build the U.C.L.A. history department into one of
the nation's best. He was also dean of social sciences in 1976 and
dean of the College of Letters and Sciences from 1977 to 1982.
Among his other books are "Paths to the Present: Aspects of European
Thought From Romanticism to Existentialism" (1960); "Varieties of
Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century" (1964);
"The European Right: A Historical Profile" (1965), which he edited and
wrote with Hans Rogger, a colleague at U.C.L.A.; "La Fin des
Terroirs" (1983); "France: Fin de Siècle" (1986); "The Hollow Years:
France in the 1930s" (1994); and "Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and
Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages" (1999).
Mr. Weber was a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellow and in 1977 was
decorated with the Ordre National des Palmes Académiques for his
contribution to French culture.
In his introduction to a book of collected essays, "My France:
Politics, Culture, Myth" (1991), Mr. Weber admitted to having a mind
that was "more like a jumbly hayloft than an orderly library."
Tireless in pursuit of detail, he delighted in sharing the fruits of a
lifetime spent in provincial archives.
In a review of "My France" for The New York Times Book Review, Mr.
Judt gave an example of Mr. Weber's feel for France and his "richly
textured sense of the complex otherness of the recent past" by noting
his discussion of why it took "La Marseillaise" almost a century to
emerge from a Strasbourg drawing room on April 26, 1792, as the battle
song of the Rhine Army to become the French national anthem.
"Mr. Weber reminds the reader that in 1790 only about three million
people could speak French; as late as 1893, about one-quarter of the
population of 30 million still had not mastered the national
language," Mr. Judt wrote. "Small wonder that it took so long for the
'Marseillaise' to catch on - many of those trying to learn the words
could not understand them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/arts/22weber.html?ref=obituaries