Guizot-Institut de France Prize 2014
On 16 October, at the Institut de France, the Prix François Guizot-Institut de France was awarded to Jacques Julliard for his book:
Les gauches françaises. 1762-2012 : Histoire politique et imaginaire, Flammarion.[The French Lefts, 1762-2012: History, Politics and Imagination] (Flammarion)
This book is the first synthesis on the French lefts, from the eighteenth century to the present day, from the philosophers of the Enlightenment to François Hollande. It shows what the left retained from each historical period: the idea of progress from the late eighteenth century, the rights of man from the Revolution, parliamentarism from the monarchy with property-based suffrage, universal suffrage from 1848, secularism from the Third Republic, the civilisation of labour from the Popular Front, and the patience in power of François Mitterrand. Finally, it distinguishes four lefts: liberal, Jacobin, collectivist and libertarian.
The intellectual background of each period is illuminated by “paired portraits” in the manner of Plutarch – from Voltaire and Rousseau, by way of Robespierre and Danton, Lamartine and Hugo, Clemenceau and Jaurès, to Sartre and Camus, and finally Mendès France and Mitterrand… A vision that is at once historical and anthropological.
Born on 4 March 1933 in Brénod, in the Ain, Jacques Julliard is a journalist, essayist, historian by training and former trade union leader. Coming from a family of local notables, he grew up in a republican milieu in the Radical tradition. He entered the khâgne in Lyon in 1950, where he was strongly influenced by his reading of Marx, Proudhon, Pascal and Kant. Jacques Julliard was admitted to the École normale supérieure in the rue d’Ulm in 1954 and joined the journal Esprit the following year, thanks to Jean Lacroix. He became involved in student unionism and held anti-colonialist views. In 1956 he left the UNEF to chair the National Student Conference for a Solution to the Algerian Problem. He took part in the Reconstruction group. Having passed the agrégation in history, he went to Algeria in 1959 as a psychological action officer working with the civilian population. Back in France, he taught in Chartres and then at the IEP in Bordeaux. In 1965 he became editor of a political series at Le Seuil. The following year he became a professor at the IEP in Paris and a lecturer at the Sorbonne. In 1978 he published his first editorial in Le Nouvel Observateur. In 1982 he founded the political and cultural journal Intervention. Jacques Julliard is the author of several political essays, including La Faute aux élites [Blame It on the Elites] and La Reine du monde : essai sur la démocratie d’opinion [The Queen of the World: An Essay on Opinion Democracy], as well as a Dictionnaire des intellectuels français [Dictionary of French Intellectuals]. In December 2010, Jacques Julliard joined the weekly Marianne, after 32 years with Le Nouvel Observateur.
Speeches by Catherine Coste, Jacques Julliard, Michel Zink and Jean-Claude Casanova.