The French Academy “recruits”; more exactly, it replaces with a certain haste, the missing members. After recently electing Chantal Thomas, the author of Farewell to the queen (2002), the writer Daniel Rondeau, the lawyer and writer François Sureau, she has just elected on March 5, 2021, the historian Pascal Ory, born in 1948, in the chair of François Weyergans. It’s a good surprise. This election promotes under the dome one of our best connoisseurs of cultural history and undoubtedly one of the most eclectic minds that we can meet in this field. Comic critic, informed cinephile, regent of the College of Pataphysics, founded in 1948, whose science of the same name was invented by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), instigator of the Rencontres François Rabelais de Tours, which for 16 years has sanctified gastronomy , radio man, he worked for a long time at France Culture, the list of his centers of interest is so varied that we cannot name them all.
A specialist in French cultural history, his latest book proves that he is not reluctant to immerse himself in the vast world. What is a nation?, indeed, published in 2020, slumbered in him for fifty years, and the fact that it is subtitled, “A world history”, shows to what extent he is not locked in France as would suggest his previous works, such French cultural adventure (1989) or Culture as an adventure (2008). But, if there is one word to remember in Pascal Ory’s career, it is the latter. His journey is an adventure, a kind of gratitude for everything that happens, is invented, shifts the boundaries between scholarly culture and popular culture. With the exception, perhaps, of his book dedicated to collaborators, which was his kickoff in 1977, and his only real bookstore success if we stick to the numbers.
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Born in Fougères, from a father who was responsible for the editorial staff of Sud-Ouest, from a father, he says, who loved life, who wrote every day, from a mother, who ran the house, like he was common at the time, his parents had one thing in common. The paternal grandfather was a baker, the maternal grandfather a miller. The grandson had to knead the cultural flour, turn it over, knead it in all directions. He was helped there in Rennes, from his sixth grade, by the high school he attended then. This was no less than the one in which Father Ubu was born, a double of a professor of physics, who was said to be the most heckled in France. It was also the school where Dreyfus’ second trial took place. Enough to stir up the senses and the spirit of the young Ory who has remained faithful to this place, by going there regularly.
As luck would have it, at 12 years old, he came across The history of the great Germanic invasions of Pierre Courcelles, and which he retains from this reading, a strong impression which later encouraged him to become a member of a strange brotherhood, of which his imagination has the secret, and would be called: the friends of the fifth century. That the fall of the Roman Empire, its collapse, is at home at the origin of his vocation as a historian, that it is the spur of his sensitivity towards the fragility of civilizations, but also of that of institutions, explains the interest which it will carry to the responsibility of the intellectuals, to the Collaboration, and to the shock wave caused by the defeat of 1940. From this book, read at the dawn of his adolescence, Pascal Ory, which does not is however not in life a tragic affirmed, has kept the sense of the ephemeral character of empires, civilizations, nations. Closeness to tragedy. That accompanies it, and in a sense, defines it.
Popular culture
Faced with this vulnerability, it therefore had to build its own dikes. They relate to cultural policy, through which he entered the world of academics. His thesis, which he took ten years to write, with René Rémond as boss, deals precisely with this subject. And this is saying a lot that it was innovative. So much on the way in which he approached popular culture, the popular festival, at this time, when Jacques Prévert, and Jean Renoir, made the front page. Tried to connect with the spirit of the times, popular theater, patriotic cinema. To make the synthesis between the meeting and the spectacle as the Fête de l’Humanité still strives. Pascal Ory, who was part of François Mitterrand’s close guard in the 1970s, refused when he was elected to join the cultural administration in order to persevere in his profession as a historian. He did well. But we do not understand anything about what happened under this seven-year term, in cultural matters, if we do not link it to the heritage of the Popular Front. Whether we approve of Jack Lang’s cultural policy or not, this socialist policy, which intended to compete with Communist policy, is imbued with it. It stems from this “culture for everyone”, from which we now rightly remember what makes the book industry happy: the law on the single book price.
“I preferred to remain a historian”, says Pascal Ory. And it was a good choice. The one who was deputy mayor of Chartres, declares himself, still today a social democrat, he is one of those who have contributed to the dissemination of culture. Not that of those accustomed to reading, theater, music, but that which is distributed, is built, through media libraries, lounges, comics. He has, in his own way, tried to moderate the slogan “subversion-subsidy”, not by circumventing the need for cultural policies, but by taking into account what we lack today: mediations. Namely, the bridge that connects the culture of the elites and the culture for all: popular culture. Which makes it possible to link the cultural offer and the training of culture users.
May he, under the dome make his voice heard. This way. Which would do the Academy the greatest good …
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