Philippe Ariès

Philippe Ariès (Blois, July 21st 1914 - Toulouse, February 8th 1984) was a Historien and Journaliste French.

Biographical elements

Influences traditionalists and preserving

Ariès grows in a creole family catholic and Royaliste. He studies at the Jésuites of Saint-Louis-with-Gonzague then with the Lycée Janson-with-Sailly and militates some time within the “High-school pupils and schoolboys of the French Action”. He writes in particular in the French student, magazine of the students of the French Action, in which also take part Claude Roy, Raoul Girardet, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Gaxotte or Pierre Boutang.

Without disavowing its friendship for his companions of feather, it gradually moves away from the medium of the French Action which it judges " Nationalist autoritaire" whereas him is defined as “traditionalist” and sensitive to the " anarchistic and royal model of XVIe siècle" ( a historian of Sunday ). It publishes thereafter several articles in newspapers directed by Pierre Boutang: French Words and the French Nation.

Difficult recognition of the statute of historian

After two successive failures with the oral examination of the aggregation of History, it enters to the colonial Research institute in 1943. Chief of the service of documentation, it occupies, according to his own words, " of importation of tropical fruits " and is distinguished, in this station which it leaves in 1979, while developing of the techniques of Document ation with an obvious direction of the technical innovation, in particular by preaching a pioneer use in France of the Microfilm (1956) and Informatique (1965). During this period, he is also director of collection to the editions Plon.

In parallel of these professional occupations, Ariès, that its family origin could have pushed to follow the way of a Bainville or a Gaxotte and to publish studies " large public" , chooses very an other way. The inspiration which underlies its research attaches incontestably to the school of the " Annales" , medium however dominated by the laic and republican tradition.

Since 1948, in the most complete anonymity, it publishes its first study, " history of the French populations and their attitudes in front of the life since the XVIII° siècle" which marks, in spite of its statistical insufficiencies, birth of the searchs for historical demography leading to an attempt at analysis of mentalities of the old companies.

Its second book, " the Child and family life under Old Régime" in 1960, receives a reception quite as discrete. However, translated into English, the work meets a very great success with the the United States - allured by this innovative study on the family - what ensures its author a paradoxical international audience since France hardly discovers it.

In 1977, it integrates EHESS as a director of studies and thus obtains its pars the late recognition (it has more than 60 years) of its statute of historian. It publishes the same year its large last delivers, " The Man in front of the mort" , work lengthily matured in full effervescence of teratological history. Ariès spans the chronological borders for better seizing the Western attitudes in front of death, of the end of the world Roman at the 19th century. One reproaches Philippe Ariès the disparity of his sources. He answers these criticisms by the need which was his to devote to its research its rare moments of leisures.

Creator of a new field destined for great successes, famous the " history of the mentalités" , P. Ariès appears close to a Michel Foucault - of which it published the Histoire of the madness at the traditional age and who writes his obituary a few months before its clean dead - by his preoccupation with a interdisciplinarity confining with the ethnology even the Psychanalyse. Died too early, it leaves a very original work by the conditions of its realization and the implications historiographic which it caused.

Works

A " historian of the dimanche"

Philippe Ariès, atypical Historian (" dimanche" as it qualifies itself), is caught initially passion for the historical Démographie, discipline within which it can make profitable its innovative methods of treatment, before being devoted to the Histoire of mentalities, of which it becomes one of the emblematic figures. It also contributes, in a considerable way, to give its noble letters for the use of the Iconographie in Histoire.

The child and family life under the Old Mode

The theory of Ariès on the childhood shows how the company evolves/moves because mentalities evolve/move. Its thesis rests on two ideas: the attachment of the parents for their children was really born with the Birth control and fruitfulness lowers it, that is to say starting from the end of the XVIIIe century; before the child is only one adult in becoming and strong mortality prevents a maternal and paternal attention too important. In the medieval company, that Philippe Ariès takes for starting point, the feeling of childhood does not exist; that does not mean that the children were neglected, given up, or scorned. The feeling of childhood does not merge with the assignment of the children: it corresponds to a conscience of the childish characteristic, this characteristic which distinguishes primarily the child from the even young adult. This conscience did not exist. As soon as the child had crossed this period of strong mortality where its survival was improbable, it merged with the adults. Thus, Ariès explains the importance given to the child in our contemporary company by the fact that mortality and fruitfulness having dropped, the nuclearisation of the family around a child with the real potential of life was reinforced. There is not in this thesis of concept of rupture with the old traditions, but only one evolution of mentalities, which, establishing the link between mortality and importance of the child, prepares the study of Ariès on death.

The man in front of death

Philippe Ariès is caught passion for the study of the population vis-a-vis died through the history, seeing there a pillar of the construction of the company. The historian, resulting from the rows of the French Action, which denounces the demographic decline of France like source of misfortunes, shows how death passed from the commonplace to the taboo between the Middle Ages and the contemporary period. He distinguishes, in the Man in front of death, two type of relationship of the man with death: tamed death and wild death. I quote: “death is now so unobtrusive our manners which we have sorrow to imagine and to include/understand it. The old attitude where death at the same time close, familiar and is decreased, anaesthetized, is opposed too much to ours where it makes if large-fear that we do not dare any more to say his name. This is why, when we call this familiar death tamed death, we do not understand by there that it was formerly wild and that it was then domesticated. We want to say on the contrary that it became wild today whereas it was not it before. The oldest death was tamed. ”

The death tamed, according to Ariès, finishes when the proximity between dead and alive is not tolerated any more. Death from now on would be regarded more and more as a transgression which tears off the man with his daily life, at its reasonable company, its monotonous work, to subject it to a paroxysm and to then throw it in an irrational, violent and cruel world. Death is a rupture today, whereas in the past it was so present around the man whom it made to some extent part of the life. One could die very easily, and death did not appear like something of extraordinary. Ariès gives the example of the cemetery, which in the past was intramurally built city and which today tends to avoid a too great proximity with the alive ones.

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