World War I historian Jean-Jacques Becker died Monday at the age of 95, his daughter, historian Annette Becker, told Agence France-Presse. Born on May 14, 1928 in Paris, Jean-Jacques Becker devoted most of his research to the study of this conflict, then began work on political history and the analysis of the left in France.
His work has brought an innovative approach, taking into account the experience of men and not just diplomatic and military adventures. “As a child, I devoured in my room the numbers of Illustration devoted to the Great War”, he would say one day. In his own family, the shadow of the “der des ders” is present: his father, from a Jewish family who fled Alsace for Paris during the war of 1870, was mobilized in 1916 and decorated in Verdun .
After the war, he studied history at the Sorbonne and, like almost all of his family, joined the Communist Party. But, having become a teacher and aware of the distancing that his discipline implies, he does not put much zeal into it. He broke with the PCF in 1960, at the very moment when he was transferred to a Parisian high school, after Khrushchev’s revelations about the excesses of Stalinism.
We learn of the death of Jean-Jacques Becker, professor of contemporary history in our department from 1985 to 1994. A huge specialist in the First World War, a very fine connoisseur of French political life, he was an eminent figure in @UParisNanterre pic .twitter.com/bcrZwmDwaY
“It was heartbreaking to see that such abominations were perpetrated in the name of the ideal in which we had sincerely believed for a decade”, explained Jean-Jacques Becker 50 years later. When the Historial de la Grande Guerre was created in Péronne (Somme) in 1992, he became the director of the research center attached to the museum. He brought foreign historians there, including the German Gerd Krumeich, with whom he published in 2008 the first Franco-German History of the Great War.