The rebroadcast of Catherine Bernstein’s documentary dedicated to the historian and philosopher Mona Ozouf offers itself opportunely as a happy breath of… iodized air. Brittany, the country of her childhood (she was born Mona Annig Sohier there in 1931), holds a special place in this film which goes beyond the conventional biography to offer a stroll marked by melancholy on the paths of identity.
Paths strewn with doubts and questions. But also of a feeling of loneliness – filled by reading – and of confinement with a grandmother of French mixed with Breton and a mother lost in the “religion of sorrow” after the death of her husband, when Mona was 4 years old.
No pity, however, in the little Breton woman who became a great historian who, back on the benches of the primary school of Plouha (Côtes-d’Armor) – where her mother, teacher officiated -, shares her love with young students. of the republican school, a place of protection from external threats, from pain, at the door of which one deposits one’s particularities.
Different beliefs
“Perplexed”, thus she defines her youth torn between three worlds – the house dedicated to Brittany, the republican school and the Catholic Church – which profess different beliefs. At the time of the plural “I” will succeed, for the agrégée in philosophy, that of the encounters which will guide its choices more surely than the vocation. This “we” “warm” of his brief communist engagement alongside young historians who “did not yet have a work, but already the idea of ????doing one”. A tape without which she would not have written, in which we find Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Maurice Agulhon, Denis Richet, Jacques Ozouf, her husband, and of course François Furet, with whom she will sign in 1988 the Critical Dictionary of the Revolution French (Flammarion), which will give rise to many debates and controversies.
It is there, in this period, that our difficult – if not violent – ??relationship to identity is based, according to the historian. “Everything comes from the French Revolution, because once the king was beheaded, you had to find such a strong unity,” she said. As a result, there was a kind of obsession with “one and indivisible France” which was very unfriendly to cultural identities. »
Alternately a frail silhouette strolling on the shores of her Breton childhood, a historian and philosopher explaining with clarity the controversy of the Enlightenment between Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797), or even a citizen discussing the idea nation with rapper Abd Al Malik, author of Camus, the art of revolt (Fayard, 2016).
Catherine Bernstein weaves with infinite delicacy the intimate and intellectual portrait of a woman for whom, today, the question is not so much to ask who we are, but who the other is.
