An “intellectual” in the sense the term acquired in French at the time of the Dreyfus Affair — Pierre Vidal-Naquet assuredly was one. To be an “intellectual,” in his case, was the consequence — not natural, but constructed, necessary and assumed — of the choice he had made to be a historian. On the reasons and the stages of his choice, he explains himself at length, on several occasions, notably in the collection entitled Le choix de l’histoire (The Choice of History) (Arléa, 2004). Better than anyone, he knows that there is an irreducible difference between memory and history, but it is a historian’s concern that works upon him and prompts him to clarify this aspect of his personal history. He could have, he himself notes, chosen other paths within what people were beginning to call, around 1950, the human sciences. In his rationalizations of the moment — which he did not later repudiate — he said that the historical discipline afforded a view of the totality of a period, a culture, an event. To do history, to make himself a historian, was for him a way of renouncing neither the concreteness of singular facts nor philosophical reflection.
It was in this state of mind, in any case, with this ambition, that he chose his field: the history of ancient Greece. A profoundly innovative history, steeped in anthropology. It asserts itself first and reveals itself to the public in the collection entitled Le Chasseur noir (The Black Hunter) (1st edition, Maspero, 1981), whose content is perfectly synthesized in the subtitle Formes de pensée et formes de société dans le monde grec (Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World). This book had been preceded by a work written in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et tragédie 1 (Myth and Tragedy 1) (Maspero, 1972), and would be followed, until the end of his life, by a long series of studies that profoundly renewed, broadened and deepened the field of Greek studies. But from the outset, the historian’s work, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is inseparable from historiography, on the one hand, and, on the other, from an inquiry into the way our own political practice and thought are articulated upon what we know of what the Greeks did and thought.
To choose ancient Greece, then, is not to limit oneself to the exploration of the past. Rather, the consciousness of the present informs in a far more direct and pressing way the approach of the historian and, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s case, contributes to the drawing of his figure as an intellectual. This too he says with insistence and lucidity in his Mémoires (Memoirs) (Seuil, La Découverte, 1995 and 1998): his childhood was marked by the accounts his father gave him of the Dreyfus Affair — the story of a crime of which the justice system, the army and public opinion had made themselves guilty; the story too of the battle that intellectuals had waged to denounce the injustice, to analyze its causes, to shed light on the lies that had made the injustice possible, and to obtain that the truth burst forth and be acknowledged.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s childhood came to an end on 15 May 1944, when his parents were arrested by the Gestapo in Marseille to be killed at Auschwitz. He himself escaped their fate by a kind of miracle. From then on — above all from the moment when one began to form an idea of what the extermination of the Jews had been — the properly tragic question took hold of him: what exactly happened, how was it possible?
In the course of his life, Pierre Vidal-Naquet was led to pronounce on all manner of questions bearing on the injustice done to individuals and to peoples. Most often, these stances were accompanied by studies (prefaces in particular) that brought to light the history and the context of the problem at issue. But, he tells us himself: two “affairs,” two quests for truth, decisively marked his destiny as a historian of the present and thus as an intellectual and a citizen. First, “the Audin Affair,” begun in 1957; then, at the end of the 1970s, the struggle against the “negationists.” In both cases, it is first of all systems of lies and falsifications that Pierre Vidal-Naquet sets out to reveal and dismantle.
To the Audin Affair, Pierre Vidal-Naquet devoted a series of writings gathered in the volume published under that title by the Éditions de Minuit in 1989; bearing on the same subject are La Torture dans la République (Torture in the Republic) (Minuit, 1972), Les crimes de l’armée française (The Crimes of the French Army) (Maspero, 1975), and Face à la raison d’État, un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie (Facing Reason of State: A Historian in the Algerian War) (La Découverte, 1989). “It was the Algerian War that made of me a Dreyfusard in action,” he writes in Le choix de l’histoire: the mathematician Maurice Audin, arrested by the paratroopers of the French army during the Battle of Algiers on 12 June 1957, was declared “disappeared” following an escape. It soon became apparent that in reality he had died under torture. With a few friends, Pierre Vidal-Naquet undertook to shed light on the matter and showed that torture, contrary to what the authorities ceaselessly affirmed, was commonly practiced by the police and the army. To make people understand what this fact revealed about the functioning of democracy in France — this would be the first great combat of the intellectual Pierre Vidal-Naquet. It is here that his “anticolonialist” commitment begins, a commitment that would never curb his freedom of judgment.
The struggle against the “little sect” of the “Assassins of Memory” (such is the title of the collection published by La Découverte in 1987) was, I was witness to it, an infinitely painful experience. The enterprise of the “revisionists” aimed to win acceptance for the idea that the gas chambers had not existed and that, in sum, the Shoah was a myth. Pierre Vidal-Naquet patiently dismantled, point by point, the impostures, the falsifications and the paralogisms of these discourses.
A Jew by his parents’ destiny, a Jew also by the history of his time, a “Dreyfusard” intellectual, author of a masterly study on the end of ancient Judaism (concerning Flavius Josephus), evidently implicated in the torments and the dramatic debates aroused by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors — was Pierre Vidal-Naquet a Jewish intellectual? To this question one cannot answer briefly. He was, to be sure, entirely a stranger to all the forms of Jewish religion and tradition. Occasions will arise, I hope, that will make it possible to introduce a more detailed analysis of Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s relations with Judaism. For one who was witness to his life and the constant reader of his writings, it is clear that he was, as one says in Yiddish, “a mensch.”