My ties to Larry Kritzman are at once professional, intellectual, and friendly. We are both academics and editors, and these dual pursuits alone would serve as a bond between us. Larry was the first foreign editor to take interest in Les Lieux de mémoire. Even before the publication of its seven volumes was completed in France, he had already decided in 1993 to create a three-volume selection for the collection he directs at Columbia University Press. The introduction he wrote for it expresses an intimate comprehension of a project that many French historians had, for their part, difficulty understanding. From there arose between us an intellectual affinity, which our ties of friendship have only deepened through the years. Over the course of our meetings in Paris, I discovered that the directions of his work and writing intersected with my own interests. These can be found in the present volume: the history of intellectuals, French Jewish culture, the connection between memory and history. But I also—above all— progressively discovered an exceptional person, distinguished by a rare openness to others as well as a characteristic uncommon in our circles: kindness.

His talent as an editor and familiarity with the French intellectual world found their most complete expression in the monumental work that is The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought. Its scale has doubtless hindered its translation into French, which one cannot help but regret. In it Larry Kritzman lends an expansive definition to the word ‘thought.’ This includes film as well as economics, history, or political philosophy. It concerns the great currents of ideas as much as the men and women who incarnate and convey them; added to this are the wide array of their means of diffusion, publication, and analysis. The ambition to embrace such an assortment requires an exceptional range of personal culture and a familiarity with the most varied sectors of French culture and civilization. Kritzman has an obvious fascination and curiosity for the strange tribe that is the ‘French intellectual,’ that unique mix of literature and thought, reason, principle, and justice. He is very familiar with its ancestor and almost inventor, Montaigne, to whom he consecrated one of his most important books. He knows well its contemporaries, from Sartre to Lévi-Strauss and Foucault.