Hellenist Claude Mossé is dead

Good day I’m Elena and thanks to be here on Alessandro III di Macedonia- Alexander the Great and Hellenism. Today I’ve a bad news to share with you.

Claude Mossé passed away on December 12, 2022 at the age of 97, a few days before her 98^e anniversary.

When a great scholar leaves, not only his family members lose an important column but also the world loses a light that illuminated humanity and civilization. I just read Alexander: Destiny and Myth (Alexandre. La destinée d’un mythe) and we could see her great preparation on the subject. I was hoping she would publish something else about Alexander and unfortunately she didn’t but I will surely have the opportunity to read more of her books. My condolences to her loved ones. I report below the beautiful words of those who knew her.

She was one of the last representatives of this generation of great historians of the Greek world, which ranged from Edouard Will to Pierre Vidal-Naquet passing, in particular, by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Leveque. Born on December 24, 1924 in Paris, she had had to face, as a young girl and student, the Vichy racial laws which hindered the enrollment of French Jews at university, while the École Normale Supérieure she was aiming for was closed since she was recruiting for the Civil Service. She received first in the history and geography aggregation in 1947 (the aggregation reserved for women had this title since 1944), after a few years as a teacher of preparatory classes in Rennes, she enrolled at the university as an assistant in Rennes (1950).

Strongly marked by the war experienced as a teenager, Claude Mossé soon decides to devote his research to ancient Greece, a land of freedom as taught by the great texts of the Attic orators, and in particular Demosthenes. She was in fact a great political historian, sensitive both to the political philosophy elaborated by the Greeks, to the structures put in place over time, but also to the real practices of political life within the cities. She is a historian open to the most diverse points of view, she has not hesitated to change position over time, under the influence of scholars such as Moses Finley or Arnaldo Momigliano. Her 1959 thesis, marked by the Marxism to which many French historians of the time adhered, was published under the title The Decline of the Greek City in the 4th Century (1962) and based almost exclusively on Greek authors of that century. While the idea of a “decline” was mooted at the outset, her focus on Athens’ economic and social issues and their interaction with politics constituted a fruitful long-term shift. You can find traces of it in a small work published in 1966 on Work in Ancient Greece (Que Sais-je?), an almost new question for the time. An avid teacher, she quickly turned to a genre that began appearing in the 1960s—student textbooks, most of which would be reprinted many times. He then deals successively with Political institutions (Armand-Colin, 1968), Tyranny in ancient Greece (PUF 1969), Colonization in Antiquity (Nathan, 1970), each time providing not only a clear and very current synthesis thanks to the breadth of his readings, but new and original points of view. Whether it is a very small practical guide like The Citizen in Ancient Greece (Nathan 1993), a limited summary like History of a Democracy, Athens (Le Seuil, 1971), a vast textbook that encompasses all of Greek history like the Précis of Greek history. From the beginning of the second millennium to the battle of Actium, written in collaboration with Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillon (Armand-Colin 1991), or from a global synthesis such as volume II of The Greek world and the Orient. The fourth century and the Hellenistic period (PUF 1991) where you wrote the entire first part on the fourth century, we find the same qualities of clarity and precision in the development.

But Claude Mossé has never been confined to a single theme, even if it is as rich as that of politics. Many other subjects have attracted his attention, such as Women in Ancient Greece (Albin Michel, 1983) or Greek Myths (Nathan, 1991, with photographs by Erich Lessing), or even various biographies, an exercise of which we know the extreme difficulty for Antiquity: Demosthenes (Armand-Colin, 1994), Alexandre (Payot, 2001), Pericles (Payot, 2005) were thus in turn the object of his concerns. However, he did not abandon scientific research and played a leading role in the Center Louis-Gernet (“Comparative Research Center on Ancient Societies”) led by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet: the volume of tributes dedicated to him under the directed by Pauline Schmitt-Pantel and François de Polignac, Athens and politics: in the wake of Claude Mossé, (Albin-Michel, 2007) rightly underlines its driving role. Active into her old age, she still expressed her views on Athenian democracy (Perrin, 2013) on the eve of his 90th birthday. But the portrait would be incomplete if we didn’t mention her kindness, her concern for others, her benevolence towards young researchers, which in no way detracted from her concern for rigor. A woman committed to the left by family tradition and by conviction, free from any sectarianism, she shared the battles of historians against the Algerian war, against the denial of the Holocaust but also against the so-called “memorial” laws. A modest, even discreet woman, she remains alive through an important work that will be influential for a long time.
Maurice Sartre my translation from French