Suzanne Citron

Suzanne Citron, born Suzanne Grumbach on 15 July 1922 in Ars-sur-Moselle and died on 22 January 2018 in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, was a French historian and essayist of the left.

She is known for her work on the national myth and the teaching of history in France.

Biography Suzanne Citron was born into a bourgeois Jewish family with Alsatian, Parisian and Portuguese roots. Both her grandfathers received the Legion of Honour: on her father's side, Paul Grumbach (1861–1931), who was a brigadier general, and, on her mother's side, Eugène Dreyfus (1864–1936), a magistrate who was President of the Paris Court of Appeal. She spoke of a "family that considered itself Franco-Israelite, order being important" (""). She was brought up in a secular and patriotic environment, with her father often referring to the Dreyfus Affair.

She studied at the Lycée Molière in Paris. At the beginning of the Second World War, her father was imprisoned in Germany. During the Occupation, after the arrest of two of her cousins during a raid, she clandestinely crossed the demarcation line on 15 July 1941 into the free zone. She studied history and was active in the resistance.

She was an agrégée d'histoire (1947) and taught for about twenty years at the lycée in Enghien-les-Bains. She then taught at the University of Paris XIII-Villetaneuse. From 1977 to 1983, she was deputy mayor of Domont (Val-d'Oise). She left the Socialist Party in 1985 and reproached the Minister of National Education, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, for having re-established a national history that placed France at the centre of the world. This book went through several editions. In the last, which dates from 2017, it recognised the progress made in the teaching of history in France over the previous thirty years, with the appearance of a critical history of the Vichy regime, teaching about the Algerian war, of colonisation and that the history of immigration to France is now discussed in the public arena.

Suzanne Citron was also a member of the (CVUH), an association of historians founded to monitor the public use of history for collective memory purposes, particularly by politicians.

She died in Paris on 22 January 2018 at the age of 95 and was buried alongside her husband in Montjustin.

Statement of position In July 2017, in an article published on the website of the daily newspaper Le Monde and entitled "By inviting Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron is instrumentalizing French history", Suzanne Citron criticized what she considered to be Emmanuel Macron's instrumentalization of French history, guilty, in her opinion, of fuelling confusion about French history by inviting the Israeli Prime Minister to the commemoration of the Vél' d'Hiv roundup.

Her position, set out in three paragraphs, continued as follows: "Interned at Drancy on 4 July 1944 and liberated by the events of 17 August 1944, I formally deny any justification for the presence of a man who condones the exactions and misdeeds of Israeli colonisation in Palestine, and I reject the endless and demagogic confusion between antisemitism and criticism of the State of Israel" ("Internée à Drancy le 4 juillet 1944 et libérée par les événements du 17 août 1944, je dénie formellement toute justification à la présence d’un homme cautionnant les exactions et les méfaits de la colonisation israélienne en Palestine et je récuse la sempiternelle et démagogique confusion entre antisémitisme et critique de l’État d’Israël").

Private life She was the wife of the French literary historian and musicologist Pierre Citron (1919–2010).

Publications

, Bordas, 1971. , Les Éditions ouvrières, 1984. , Les Éditions ouvrières, 1987. , Syllepse, 1989. , Les Éditions de l'Atelier, 1992; 2nd ed. 1995. , Syros jeunesse, 1996; new updated edition 1999, digital version 2015 (« L'histoire des hommes, racontée par Suzanne Citron », on www.chalifour.fr (pdf, 340 MB)). , Syllepse, 2003. , Les Éditions de l'Atelier/Les Éditions ouvrières (pocket), 2008 (updated 1987 edition); new edition 2017.

Distinctions

Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur

Notes et références