Posted Sep 29, 2022, 6:44 PM
Honorary professor at the Collège de France, Paul Veyne was a specialist in Greco-Roman antiquity, which he revived with passion in a work as scholarly as it is iconoclastic. He had met with public success in 2015 with his essay “Palmyra, the irreplaceable treasure”, an ode to the Syrian city destroyed by the Islamic State group.“Whether its notables wore (note: in the time of its splendor) Greek or Arabic clothing, whether Aramaic, Arabic, Greek and even, on special occasions, Latin were spoken there, one felt the blowing Palmyra a thrill of freedom, non-conformism, multiculturalism », he wrote. Intolerable feeling for those who destroyed the city, according to him.
A man on the left, but having voted for Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, in 2014 he won the Femina prize for essays for his autobiography “And in eternity I won’t get bored” which retraced, with humor, his career as a historian and intellectual in post-war France. In 2017, he received the prize from the National Library of France (BnF) for all of his work.
Freedom-loving
Born on June 11, 1930 in Aix-en-Provence, into a modest Petainist family, he was a teenager passionate about the “Odyssey”, which deciphered the Latin inscriptions in the museum of Nîmes. Perfect representative of the Republican social ladder, he entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1951 and passed the grammar aggregation. He took his Communist Party card but left it in 1956 when Soviet tanks entered Budapest.
After passing through the French School in Rome, he began his teaching career at the University at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant, before going to Aix, where he was a professor, from 1976 to 1999. In 1975 , he entered the Collège de France, supported by the great liberal thinker Raymond Aron. He will keep his chair of History of Rome until 1988. During the inaugural lesson, he is not very reverent towards his master. Aron will resent him all his life.
Of Paul Veyne, some colleagues said that he was a bit of a maverick among many historians and professors. He assumed his image as a provocateur, a freedom-lover, a researcher favoring a multidisciplinary approach. Friend of the philosopher Michel Foucault, admirer of the poet René Char – he devoted a book to each -, Paul Veyne notably wrote “Bread and the circus”, “Did the Greeks believe in their myths? », « When our world became Christian » or « The Roman erotic elegy ».
In “The Greco-Roman Empire” (Chateaubriand Prize 2006), he explains that the distinction, even the opposition, between Greece and Rome remains a “myth”: “the so-called Roman Empire was in reality Greco-Roman”, he wrote. He tries to answer the questions that everyone can ask themselves: “Why did emperors die so rarely in bed? », “Why were there so many mad Caesars? », “Has Christian charity put an end to gladiatorial combat? », “Was monarchical pomp propaganda? » Where “Are world civilization and national identity incompatible or auxiliary? ».
This mountaineering enthusiast, father of a child, was suffering from a congenital malformation which deformed his face. “I never wanted to shed a tear about it.he said. At school, they called me the man with the bell. A southern word meaning bump. I suffered from it as a child, but I hurried to stop suffering from it, considering the people who attacked me to be idiots”.
With AFP
