Jeanne Gaillard

Jeanne Gaillard (23 December 1909 – 19 September 1983) was a French historian and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Biography She was born as Jeannette Marie Rose Langlade at La Rochelle. Her father, a career officer, having been killed during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915, she grew up at Béziers and received a scholarship to enable her to study history at Montpellier. After graduating in 1930, she became a teacher, holding positions at Guéret and Toulouse and, in 1936, at the Lycée Jules-Ferry in Paris, where she continued until 1950. In 1937, she met her husband Pol, and they were married in 1941. They had five children: Anne, Manuelle, Pierre, Luc and Roland.

Gaillard became a militant Communist. In 1940, she offered refuge to the physicist Jacques Solomon, a fellow teacher and editor of an underground magazine, L'Université libre, at her Paris home. Solomon was later arrested and executed by the occupying forces. Jeanne and her husband continued to participate in the production and distribution of the magazine.

After the war, she was a regular contributor to the multidisciplinary publication La Pensée. In 1950, she took up a teaching post at the Lycée Molière, but she was forced to leave in 1955, her health weakened by an earlier bout of tuberculosis. From 1964 to 1976, she worked as a "Maître-assistante" at the Paris Nanterre University, where she published many articles and obtained her doctorate in history; her thesis, Paris, la ville, accepted in 1975, is extensively quoted in historical research. Adrian Rifkin calls it "a long and complex chef d'oeuvre of urban demography", but criticises Gaillard's use of history to support the Marxist economic theories of Guy Debord. Parallels have been drawn between Gaillard's work and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Jeanne died in 1983 from an allergic reaction to a wasp bite.

Published works

Monographs Source: Communes de province, Commune de Paris 1870-1871, Paris, Flammarion, collection "Questions d'histoire", 1971. Paris, la ville (1852-1870), thesis presented at Paris Nanterre University 27 February 1975, Ed. Honoré Champion, 1976. 2nd edition (by Florence Bourillon & Jean-Luc Pinol), 1997, éditions L'Harmattan.

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