Eric Hazan, an influential writer who delivered to France’s consideration a few of the nation’s most incendiary left-wing writers and who was himself a particular historian of Paris, died there on June 6. He was 87.
His demise was confirmed by the publishing home he based, La Fabrique, which launched no different particulars. Mr. Hazan had been handled for most cancers.
From an previous constructing in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, Mr. Hazan’s tiny agency wielded an outsize affect, publishing provocative writers just like the leftist philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, the scholar Edward Stated and the historian Enzo Traverso.
La Fabrique has tackled colonialism, the rights of Palestinians, Israeli politics and the Holocaust, all guided by the hostility that Mr. Hazan, a son of immigrant Jews who had been pressured into hiding throughout World Struggle II, felt for capitalism, ethnocentrism and all types of nationalism.
Nevertheless it was as a politically engaged historian of Paris that Mr. Hazan made his biggest mark, writing a collection of passionate and erudite historic guides to town he liked however whose future he feared for, not less than one in all which received extensive acclaim on each side of the Atlantic.
Mr. Hazan might learn the streets of Paris like few others, unearthing the historic significance of road indicators, plaques on buildings, dents in a wall and what he known as the “psychogeography” of complete neighborhoods.
As a former surgeon who underwent a midlife conversion — he didn’t publish his first e book till he was 66 — Mr. Hazan dissected town’s neighborhoods with scientific precision. He would then convey them to life by evoking generations of ghosts, from town’s medieval historical past onward.
“The Champs-Élysées is the principal axis of Collaborationist Paris. There may be nearly a convention there,” Mr. Hazan wrote in his 2002 e book, “L’Invention de Paris” (“The Invention of Paris”). He went on to invoke not simply the complaisance of bourgeois Parisians towards the Nazis in the course of the occupation, but additionally their lesser-known clamor for the Prussian invaders who, they hoped, would crush the rebellious Communards in 1871.
Occupied Paris, with its community of SS torture facilities; revolutionary Paris, with its hidden landmarks of riot; imperial Paris, the place the heavy hand of authoritarian rulers might be simply discerned, as on the Rue de Rivoli — all these got here underneath Mr. Hazan’s scalpel.
The place he discovered what he known as “traces” of town wall that was constructed on the orders of King Philip II within the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, he meant not simply the wall’s bodily remnants, of which there are few, but additionally what he known as its “city penalties” — the way in which it continues to delineate Paris neighborhoods to this present day.
The author and critic Lucy Sante, writing in The New York Evaluation of Books in 2010, described “The Invention of Paris” as “one of many biggest books concerning the metropolis anybody has written in a long time, towering over a crowded subject, passionate and lyrical and sweeping and quick.”
Mr. Hazan’s ardour derived partially from his despair over the disappearance of the previous working- and middle-class Paris underneath an enormous tide of tourism, gentrification and ostentatious wealth. He lamented, as an illustration, the “full museumification” of the world across the Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, on the Left Financial institution, which he mentioned had been sterilized by an inflow of massive cash and mass tourism, leaving “nothing of its postwar glory.”
On a lot of the Proper Financial institution, the place luxurious shops for prosperous vacationers have taken over, “the attraction is gone,” he informed The Guardian in 2011. “It’s chilly.”
He predicted, with maybe extra hope than realism, that town could be saved if it might “once more leap its boundaries” and incorporate the ring of inside suburbs the place tens of millions of immigrant households stay in poverty and isolation.
Different books about Paris by Mr. Hazan which were translated embody “Paris in Turmoil: A Metropolis Between Previous and Future”; “A Stroll By Paris: A Radical Exploration”; “A Historical past of the Barricade”; and “Balzac’s Paris: The Metropolis as Human Comedy.”
The determine of Mr. Hazan himself is obvious in these books, an inveterate stroller alert to the tales the stones round him had been telling.
“It’s not solely that he was excited by all the pieces and his engagement with humanist tradition was far broader and deeper than so lots of the ‘intellectuals’ who smirk at militant commitments of his variety,” Mr. Rancière, the thinker, wrote in a tribute after Mr. Hazan’s demise. “It was as a result of he fought for a world of the widest and richest expertise, and didn’t separate the work of information and the feelings of artwork from the fervour of justice.”
Eric Hazan was born on July 23, 1936, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a well-to-do suburb of Paris. His father, Fernand Hazan, a outstanding writer of artwork books, was born in Cairo, the place Fernand’s father owned a bookstore. Eric’s mom, Blanche (Pascal) Hazan, who was born in Romania, labored on the publishing home together with her husband.
The household fled south after the German invasion in 1940, settling first in Marseille, the place Fernand Hazan rapidly received the household on its ft by establishing a sweet manufacturing facility, utilizing honey imported from Guinea and made by spiders, as Mr. Hazan recalled in a collection of interviews with France Tradition radio in 2018.
The cash his father made enabled the household to purchase a home in close by Antibes, which was then underneath the management of the extra tolerant Italians, and the household remained hidden there during the warfare in what Mr. Hazan recalled as self-sufficient “autarky.”
Eric didn’t go to high school throughout this era, however he was by no means frightened, he remembered, as a result of his mother and father had remodeled their preparations for a attainable roundup and deportation into “a recreation of cops and robbers.” Because of that early menace, Mr. Hazan determined that “France will not be my mom,” as he informed Le Monde in 2021.
After the warfare, he attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one in all Paris’s main excessive colleges. On the urging of his father however in opposition to his inclinations, he went on to change into a health care provider and a surgeon in Paris hospitals.
Mr. Hazan went to newly unbiased Algeria in 1962 to lend his companies, and to Lebanon in 1975 to apply drugs in Palestinian refugee camps. Two years earlier than abortion was legalized in France in 1975, he was one of many first medical doctors to publicly acknowledge having carried out the process.
However, on the age of 47, he determined that he’d had sufficient of medication and surgical procedure, and he took over his father’s publishing enterprise. He ultimately bought it to Hachette in 1992 and began his personal publishing home in 1998.
La Fabrique, run out of a single room, turned “a reference level for the decolonization motion,” Mr. Traverso recalled in The New Statesman. It additionally produced a short however celebrated run-in with the authorities for Mr. Hazan: After the weird and farcical ‘Tarnac Affair’ in 2008, when self-styled anarchist revolutionaries sabotaged some rail strains, and a duplicate of “L’Revolt Qui Vient,” (“The Coming Revolution”), printed by La Fabrique, was discovered among the many possessions of these arrested. Mr. Hazan was interrogated by the police; gross sales of the e book shot up.
Details about his survivors was not instantly out there.
Mr. Hazan believed within the concept of revolution and the renewing potentialities of riot, even to the extent of admiring Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolution’s information in its most bloodstained part.
“Altering the world was for him not a program for the longer term however a every day process of adjusting our imaginative and prescient and discovering the proper phrases,” Mr. Rancière wrote of Mr. Hazan. “And he understood that revolt is itself a way of discovery.”
