Pierre Vidal-Naquet var spesialist på antikkens Hellas, men skulle også komme til å kjempe mot Holocaust-revisjonistene. Han var en spesiell mann. Paul Berman skriver minneord.
Vidal-Naquet was fond of citing a French writer from the time of the French Revolution named François René de Chateaubriand, who looked on historians as the ultimate defense against tyrants. Chateaubriand might have seemed an odd hero for Vidal-Naquet to adopt, given that Chateaubriand was a Catholic royalist from an ancient aristocratic family who despised the French Revolution and Vidal-Naquet was a Jewish leftist who treasured France’s republican traditions. Something tied these writers together, even so. During the Reign of Terror, Chateaubriand’s older brother and his brother’s family were guillotined, and Chateaubriand responded, in his writings on history and even on ancient Greece, by developing a unique and touching prose style, dignified yet unmistakably grief-stricken. Vidal-Naquet likewise came from an ancient family, descended from the Jewish doctors who worked for the popes in the Middle Ages, the “Jews of the Pope.” During the Nazi occupation of France, when Vidal-Naquet was 13, his mother and father were arrested and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, and he himself escaped only because a schoolmaster dispatched a group of boys to tell him to hide. Vidal-Naquet never entirely recovered from this event — it haunted him, I am sure, until the moment of his own death. But neither was he willing to be defeated. Like Chateaubriand, he learned to write in a tone that managed to be dignified and heartbroken at the same time — the tone of a man whose devotion to facts and rigor rests precisely on his experience of catastrophe.