The death of the great medievalist Christiane Klapisch-Zuber

Exceptional medievalist who, one of the first, imposed the methods of historical anthropology by rereading Tuscan society at the end of the Middle Ages, the relationships of power and kinship, their rituals and their representations, strategies of name and parentage, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber died in Paris on November 29, on the eve of her 88th birthday.

The one who spent her entire career (1962-2002) within the Practical School of Advanced Studies (VIth section), which in 1975 became the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), was also a pioneer, with Michelle Perrot and Pauline Schmitt-Pantel, of this history of the relationship between the masculine and the feminine which, for convenience, we call women’s history since the great collective work directed by Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby (Plon, 1990-1992) of which she will pilot the medieval section.

If Christiane Zuber was born into a Protestant family from the industrial bourgeoisie in Mulhouse on November 30, 1936, she left Alsace at the age of 3, her father enlisting to escape incorporation into the armies of the Reich. After two years of wandering, the family settled in Chantilly (Oise). While his father, a chemical engineer, worked in Creil, the child discovered the fate of starving North African soldiers detained by the Nazis in the stables of Chantilly. Later, it was marked, even more than by the bombings and the excitement of the Liberation at the end of August 1944, by these shorn women, in tears, exhibited like dubious trophies.

Outraged by the crimes of colonization

The budding political consciousness soon asserted itself, less through the echoes of the Indochina war, muffled in a conservative family where these subjects were silenced, than with the start of the Algerian insurrection which coincided with his entry into higher education. . An event indeed since before Christiane, no girl in the family had accessed this level of studies.

She went to school in Chantilly then, due to a lack of high school there, from the age of 10 at the Lamartine high school in Paris (1947-1953). It was then that his professional vocation took shape. A trip with her grandmother to Florence, Italy, at age 14, from which she returned dazzled, “in love” she said of Botticelli, then, in her final year, a professor who, learning that she was destined for art history and the Ecole du Louvre, revised her project upwards, in view of her abilities: hypokhâgne, khâgne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Sèvres before the French School of Rome. She lets herself be guided and succeeds.

After the preparatory classes in Janson-de-Sailly (1953-1955), she was in Sévrier. But on the sidelines of the studies which led her to the aggregation of history and geography (1959), she linked up with fellow students who shared her indignation at the crimes of colonization, the abominations committed against those who aspire to their emancipation.

Member of an FLN support network

Among them, Fatima-Zohra Imalhayène, the first Algerian to join the School, who protests against repression in Algeria and is excluded for this. At the same time, this young woman of 21 published her first novel, Thirstunder the pseudonym Assia Djebar, which led to her being presented as the “Algerian Sagan”since they share the same publisher, René Julliard.

In solidarity with Assia, Christiane Zuber sought to help the members of the FLN, participated in street demonstrations, joined the Union of Communist Students (UEC) but, disappointed by the lack of prospects for a solution, took refuge in the readings, the revelation of the use of torture or the Audin affair proving to be decisive levers of conscience. The books published by François Maspero, the commitments of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, relayed by The Observercall him to action.

As she had a year before taking up her post at the Compiègne high school, after a trip to Morocco in February 1960 with Assia Djebar where she met the writer Mohammed Dib, she became involved with Etienne Bolo, a philosopher and energetic activist, between in the Curiel network, helps with the distribution of leaflets, transfers of funds and representatives of the FLN abroad.

But when she lends her room on Place de l’Estrapade to an illegal Algerian for one night, she is arrested and imprisoned at Petite Roquette in Paris, charged with endangering state security. She remained there from September 1960 to July 1961, her fellow inmates were the women of the Jeanson network convicted in the trial of “suitcase carriers”witnessed the escape of ten of them, feared the consequences of the Algiers putsch, before breathing, finally released, then amnesty without having been convicted. But having been unable to be installed in her position in Compiègne, Christiane Zuber cannot administratively teach. While waiting to find a solution, she became a typist for lawyer Mourad Oussedik, defender of FLN activists, collecting testimonies of the Parisian massacre of October 17, 1961.

Pioneering work on the Florentine land register

In January 1962, she decided to resume her thesis project. If she had worked under the direction of Charles-Edmond Perrin during the time of Normale Sup, it was Jacques Le Goff who came to her aid. As he resumes the direction of his 3rd thesis^e cycle on Carrara and its marbles 1300-1600 suggested by Ruggiero Romano (supported in 1966, it was published in 1969 under the title The Masters of Marble), he introduced her with Robert Philippe to Fernand Braudel, who paradoxically – the recent militant episode suited neither the man nor his formidable wife – offered her a position as a research assistant at the EPHE.

Assistant professor (1969-1980), Christiane Klapisch-Zuber – she adopted the name of her companion, the physicist Robert Klapisch – worked for more than ten years with the American historian David Herlihy on the land registerFlorentine land register from 1427, a tax document of which they deliver a computerized edition, a pioneering approach and a monument of quantitative history covering 60,000 households (Tuscans and their families, 1978). This demographic vision mixed with historical anthropology opens up a social perspective of incredible acuity. At the same time, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber is launching a seminar at EHESS with André Burguière on family, filiation and women. A path that she will never leave.

She tirelessly rereads kinship structures from an anthropological perspective: will appear The House and the name (EHESS, 1990), The Shadow of the Ancestors (Fayard, 2000), including the illustrated version, The Family Tree (La Martinière, 2003), showing the representation of genealogy, recalls the historian’s taste for art and images – which will be confirmed by the dazzling Thief of paradise. The good thief in art and society (Alma, 2015).

“She shook up the world of medievalists”

Restoring Florentine society in its carnal and symbolic dimension (Return to the CityEHESS [2006], Make a name for yourself. The invention of celebrity during the Renaissance, Arkhe [2019], Florentine weddings, EHESS-Gallimard-Seuil [2020], Florence at the writing deskEHESS [2023]), the great medievalist did it tirelessly with an elegant pen where every word is counted, in her books as in the articles of the numerous journals in which she preciously participates (Clio, Medieval).

Didier Lett, whose thesis was directed by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, remains dazzled by his intelligence, his liveliness, his insight and his ability to create new fields: “With her way of tiptoeing forward, as if not to disturb, she shook up the world of medievalists with her pioneering work which revolutionized social and cultural history. She leaves behind an immense, diverse and extraordinarily original body of work. »