An intimate and intellectual documentary of the historian and philosopher, anchored in his Breton roots. A woman for whom the question today is not so much wondering who we are, but who is the other.
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While some, with force by controversy, are trying to impose the national identity at the center of the debates of the presidential campaign, the rebroadcast of the documentary of Catherine Bernstein dedicated to the historian and philosopher Mona Ozouf offers opportunely. A happy bowl of air … iodized. Brittany, a country of his childhood (she was born Mona Annig Sohier in 1931, in Lannilis [Finistère]), holds a place of choice in this film that comes out of the agreed biography to propose a milestone flask on the paths of Identity.
Paths dotted with doubts and questions that are rooted in his childhood, marked when she is 4 years old by the loss of his father, teacher and defender of the Breton language. But also by a feeling of loneliness – filled by reading – and confinement near a grandmother in French Morning of Breton and a mother lost in the “religion of sorrow” after the death of her husband.
Toothed between three worlds
No apitation however at the small Breton became great historian who, back on the benches of the Elementary School of Plouha – there even where his mother, a teacher – shares with young students his love of the Republican school, protective place for external threats, pain, at the door of which we deposit its peculiarities.
“PERPLEX”, so does it define its youth torn between three worlds – the house dedicated to Brittany, the Republican School and the Catholic Church – which profess different beliefs. At the time of the “I” plural succeeds, for the aggregate of philosophy, that of the meetings that will guide his choices more surely than the vocation. This “warm”, “warm”, of its brief communist commitment alongside young historians who “did not have a work yet but already the idea of making it a”. A band without which it would not have written, in which we find Emmanuel Le Roy Laduria, Maurice Agulhon, Denis Richet, Jacques Ozouf, his husband, and of course François Furet, with whom she will sign in 1988 the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Flammarion) , which will arouse many debates and polemics.
This is precisely, in this period, that is based on the historian our difficult – if not violent relationship – to identity. “Everything comes from the French Revolution because once again the king decapitated, we had to find a unit as strong (…),” she said. Suddenly there was a kind of obsession with “France one and indivisible” which has been very unfriendly to cultural identities. “
In turn Frail silhouette walking on the shores of his Breton, historian and philosopher explaining the controversy of the lights between Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797), or Citizen dialogue on The nation idea with rapper Abd Al Malik, author of Camus, the art of revolt and an adaptation of the room the righteous …
Over the thread of an “I” which is an appearance in the ambivalence of his belongings, Catherine Bernstein weaves with an infinite delicacy the intimate and intellectual portrait of a woman for whom today the question is is not so much to wonder who we are, but who is the other.