French historian Marc Ferro, an expert on the history of the former USSR and Russia, as well as the wars of the 20th century, colonialism and cinema, died last night from complications of Covid-19 at the age of 96.
“He was driven to the end by a passion for history and the evolution of the world,” his family told AFP.
A historian of international fame and form of the Franco-German network Arte, where he presented for 12 years the show “Histoire parallèle” (“Parallel History”), he was also a prolific writer. In 2020 he published his 65th book, “L’entrée dans la vie”, about great personalities such as Chaplin, Kennedy, Trotsky or Gaddy.
With an Italian-Greek father and a Ukrainian mother, he was born in Paris on December 24, 1924.
His studies in History, a passion he has cultivated since childhood, are interrupted by the war. Participates in the Resistance during the Occupation, through the lines of the Maki in Vercor and participates in the liberation of Lyon. His mother, of Jewish descent, died in Auschwitz in 1943.
From 1948 to 1956 he taught in Oran, Algeria, then a French colony, and enlisted for Algerian independence.
In 1960 he returned to Paris, where he taught and prepared a doctoral dissertation on the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Marc Ferro then teaches at the Polytechnic School, where the French elite study, and then heads the “Cinéma et Histoire” research group of the Higher School of Social Sciences (EHESS).
A student of the great historian Fernand Brodel, he sought to analyze social events without judgment and at the same time directed the famous Annales Review from the 1970s.
Emeritus Director of Research at EHESS, he pioneered the late 1980s by making available to the general public film archives of great moments in modern history, such as the period 1939-45 and the Cold War.
These are the beginnings of “Parallel History”, which he will present first in Sept (1989-92) and then in Arte until 2002.
His books “The First World War 1914-1918” (Greek Letters, 1997), “How they tell the story to children all over the world” are published in Greek (Metaichmio, 2001, 2016), “Blindness” ( Metaichmio, 2017).
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