Alain Besancon

Vocation

Notable

French historian, writer, culture critic and expert on Russian politics and intellectual history who serves as honorary director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He was awarded a doctorate in history in 1967 and a doctorate in letters and human sciences a decade later. He is the author and/or co-author of 20 books. In one of his books, La Malheur du Siècle: Communisme, Nazisme et l’Unicité de la Shoah in English A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah, the historian turns to theology as the only resource that can shed even feeble illumination on how we remember ideologies responsible for incalculable destruction. Une Génération (1987), winner of Prix d’Historie of the Académie Française, and L’Image Interdite: Une Historie Intellectuelle de l’Iconoclasme (1994), awarded both the Grand Prix d’Historie Chateaubriand-La Vallée aux Loups and the Médaille de Fondation Michel Perret. Published in English to wide acclaim as The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (2000), it traces the privileging and prohibition of religious images over a span of two and a half millennia in the West. Link to Wikipedia (French)