On June 24, the French intellectual elite lost one of its most revered members: Marc Fumaroli. Infuriating to some, inspiring to most, the historian and literary scholar left an ineffaceable mark on France’s cultural landscape.
The son of a diplomat and a schoolteacher, Fumaroli grew up in Algeria and Morocco. After a peaceful but uneventful childhood, the future academic started his military service in the midst of the Algerian War. Faced with violence, misery, struggle, and vanishing hopes, the young man took refuge in literature. Descartes once wrote that “the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” At the age of 18, in the inhospitable Aurès mountains, Fumaroli began a conversation with Balzac, Chateaubriand, Molière, and all the giants of the French literary canon. The intensity and brilliance of this conversation would never thereafter disappear.
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