Edgar Morin – The “Grandfather” of French Intellectuals

Edgar Morin, a French sociologist, anthropologist, ecologist, philosopher and filmmaker whose work spanned different eras and disciplines, astounding his compatriots with his erudition and the life lessons learned from the Resistance, has died. He was 104 years old.

His death was confirmed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who in a post on "X" called him "a soldier of the Resistance, a fighter and a free spirit, a defender of nature and humanity", and also called him "the very embodiment of humanism".

He was the last survivor of a generation of intellectuals shaped by experiences during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, which gave his books and statements a special moral authority in his country. Until his death, Morin's voice and presence on the French intellectual scene remained undiminished.

His passing and engagement in the most turbulent moments of the last century gave him a credibility that few could match. “He is the grandfather of all Frenchmen,” wrote the newspaper “Libération” in a profile for his 100th anniversary in 2021, “the memory of the last century.”

His latest book, one of nearly 120 he wrote or co-wrote, had just been published. The first, published almost 80 years ago, was a poignant portrait of war-torn Germany.
In between, he published dozens of autobiographical works (it was one of his favorite subjects), anthropology, sociology, philosophy, epistemology, film studies, biology, ecology, history, and political science. This flood of books was evidence of one of his favorite doctrines: that academic disciplines should unite towards a synthesis. 

"I've never understood why all this knowledge has to be isolated," he once told a television interviewer.

Although few of his works were translated into English, he was widely followed in the Mediterranean world and Latin America, where university research centers are named after him.

There is no equivalent in America: Morin spent most of the 20th century and a quarter of the 21st century as both a participant and a critical observer. First, he was an antifascist teenager in 1938, helping to prepare food and clothing parcels for Spanish Republicans. Then, pursued by the Nazis during the war, he was part of the overlapping networks of the Resistance alongside the writer Marguerite Duras and the future French president, François Mitterrand.

The Germans, he said in the 2020 French television film “Edgar Morin, Diary of a Life,” had “three reasons to kill me: Jew, communist, Gaullist. They couldn’t have asked for better.” However, he admitted that his activities in the Resistance were somewhat limited, consisting mainly of writing anti-collaboration slogans on walls.

After the war, he was a publicly repentant ex-communist and anti-Stalinist; a pioneer of 'cinéma vérité' with the groundbreaking 1960 documentary "Chronicle of a Summer," and for many years afterward a sharp autodidact on the fringes of French academia.

Although he held an official position at the French National Center for Scientific Research after 1950, he became a staunch critic of the currents and "is-isms" that swept French academic life in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s: structuralism, Maoism, Marxism, and deconstruction. This opposition limited his influence on American campuses.

He was convinced that each of these systems reduced the complexity of the world. “I have a permanent sense of the mystery of all things, of the incomprehensible. I still don’t know why I was born, why I exist, why I’m sitting in this room talking to you,” he told an interviewer for Le Monde when he turned 101. This was one of his favorite ideas: for him, complexity meant intertwined and inseparable ways of thinking.

His fellow citizens, especially those on the left, remained eager for his words to the end, and Morin's statements on everything – from Israel and the Palestinians to the environment, French politics and cinema – could be easily found, month after month, in most French media outlets.
A Jew skeptical of Zionism, he told a television audience that he was “outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons” had, after the massacre of October 7, 2023, “undertaken a veritable mass slaughter of the populations of Gaza.”

Morin sometimes lamented that few people had read what he considered his main work, “La Méthode” (1977-2004), a six-volume philosophical treatise on knowledge, the nature and meaning of thought, and a “meditation” on “what it means to be human.” The work deals with “the organization of reality, its nonlinear progression and its reversibility.”

Instead, he is likely to be remembered for a candid autobiography about his split from the French Communist Party, as well as for two works of sociology that analyze France's divisions during the years of postwar prosperity, and for his groundbreaking documentary on the subject.

All of these works challenged the status quo from the outside and revealed the turmoil beneath France's apparent calm. His perspective was shaped by the Resistance.

“I fought an internal battle against my fear and the desire to hide,” he said. “Then I understood the difference between living and simply surviving: living means, when necessary, risking your life. That day I became an adult.”

His account of his break with the communists, "Autocritique" (1959), was called "the best and perhaps most influential autobiography of a former communist intellectual."

When much of the French intelligentsia was still under the influence of Soviet dogma, his harsh criticism of communism resonated. “Ignorance and religiosity created a kind of euphoria that was not only stupidity but also a mystical happiness of the believer,” he wrote.

Two years later, inspired by his studies of film culture, he collaborated with director Jean Rouch and interviewed people on the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France, asking them if they were happy.

"Chronicle of a Summer" is unique for its aim to erase the importance of the director, making sure the viewer never forgets his presence.

Two works of sociology in the following years attracted great attention. One analyzed social transformations in a village in Brittany before the riots of May 1968. The other dealt with the spread of an anti-Semitic rumor in Orléans.

The following decades were devoted to the writing of "La Méthode", with the aim of making readers "able to think beyond uncertainty and contradictions".

Edgar Nahoum – later taking the Resistance pseudonym “Morin” – was born on July 8, 1921, in Paris. His mother died when he was 10, an event he considered formative.
He joined the Resistance in 1942 and took part in the liberation of Paris. After the war, he graduated in history, geography and law, but later wrote that the war years were his “real school.”
He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1951 and became a prominent voice against France's war in Algeria. He continued to comment on contemporary events until the end of his life.
He is survived by his wife, Sabah Abouessalam, and two daughters from his first marriage.
Morin was the opposite of a mystic. But despite his wide reading and relentless efforts to bridge disciplines — or perhaps because of it — he suggested that there were aspects of knowledge he could not attain:

"As for God, what I want to say is that I have no relationship with this person," he had said, adding: "I do not deny that there is mystery in things. We cannot close the world in our minds and reduce its infinite complexity and infinite mystery to ideas."