Eugen Weber, Authority on Modern France, Dies at 82
By ANDREW L. YARROWPublished: May 22, 2007
Eugen Weber, the Romanian-born, English-educated American historian who was one of the worlds foremost interpreters of modern France and an authority on modern Europe, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, where he had taught at U.C.L.A. and was a former dean of its College of Letters and Science. He was 82.
 |
Eugen Weber was a history professor and former dean at U.C.L.A. His classes were so popular that he became a campus celebrity. |
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said.
Mr. Webers accessible style made him popular among students, historians and the public in the United States as well as in France, where his books on modern French history are considered classics. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of students got their first taste of modern European history from Mr. Webers best-selling textbooks like A Modern History of Europe (1971) and Europe Since 1715: A Modern History (1972).
And he was a familiar, charming presence to Americans who saw his acclaimed 52-part lecture series, The Western Tradition, produced by WGBH in Boston for public television in 1989. It became the basis of a video instructional series with companion books that students have used ever since.
Professor Weber wrote about French history and taught it in the United States for more than 40 years. He published more than a dozen distinguished books, which have been translated into more than half a dozen languages. A chair there was endowed in his name.
Mr. Weber was encyclopedic in his depiction of an era, a movement or a social trend, focusing more on the many facets of everyday life than on historical theories. History, he wrote in Europe Since 1715, was not just the epic of collective deeds, but the tissue of the times; not just what happened, but to whom and how; not just wars and politics, the doings of a relatively restricted group, but the way people lived - humbler and middling people, and the rich as well - their food, their housing, the warp and woof of their existence.
Mr. Webers work was admired in the country that so fascinated him. Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University and a leading writer on French history, once observed:
On the whole, the French write their own history and write it with much sophistication. But occasionally they come across a foreigner who does it differently or better, and then, with much fanfare and generosity, they adopt him for their own. Such is the case of Eugen Weber.
At least two of Mr. Webers works have become standard reading in France: Action Francaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (1962), a history of the royalist movement, which dominated the French right from the Dreyfus Affair until 1940; and Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976), an account of how a country that was still largely rural, inhabited by savages and a hodgepodge of cultures was transformed in the half-century after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
Mr. Weber maintained that before the 20th century, France was largely a Parisian political project rather than a national reality. Modern French identity, he said, was a relatively recent creation, a product of mass education, conscription and the coming of modern communications. After Peasants was published, Mr. Judt said, Mr. Webers thesis became the new orthodoxy.
Several of Mr. Webers books explored the development of right-wing nationalism in Europe. To Mr. Weber, nationalism had changed from a humanitarian, Enlightenment-based movement in the early 19th century into an angry, tribal and exclusivist movement in the 20th century. Despite its affinities with the historic right, the virulent, xenophobic and radical nationalism of the 20th century, he concluded, was statist and anti-individualistic.
In The Nationalist Revival in France: 1905-1914, published in 1959, Mr. Weber traced French right-wing nationalism from its royalist roots during the Third Republic beginning in the 1870s to the fascism of the Vichy regime in World War II.
Mr. Weber took a pragmatic approach to history. Nothing is more concrete than history, nothing less interested in theories or in abstract ideas, he once wrote. The great historians have fewer ideas about history than amateurs do; they merely have a way of ordering their facts to tell their story. It isnt theories they look for, but information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle them.
Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest, Romania, on April 24, 1925, the son of Sonia and Emmanuel Weber, an industrialist. At age 12, he was sent to boarding school in Herne Bay, in southeastern England, and later to Ashville College in the Lake District.
Correction: May 24, 2007
An obituary on Tuesday about the historian Eugen Weber, a leading authority on modern France, referred incorrectly to his book “La Fin des Terroirs.” The book (its full title is “La Fin des Terroirs: La Modernisation de la France Rurale — 1870-1914”) is a French translation of Mr. Weber’s book “Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France — 1870-1914.” It is not a separate book.