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André Raymond, who passed away at his home in Aix-en-Provence on 18 February 2011, leaves an international legacy in Middle East studies. Born in 1925 in Montargis, a small town situated about seventy-five miles south of Paris, Monsieur Raymond, as he was known to his numerous students and to younger scholars in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, and North America, taught for many years at the University of Provence and, after his retirement, in the United States.
After completing his studies in general history at the Sorbonne and obtaining his agrégation in 1947, André Raymond taught secondary school in Tunis, at the Lycée Carnot from 1947 to 1949, then, upon his request, from 1949 to 1951 at the Collège Sadiki, the famous secondary school founded before the French protectorate by Khayr al-Din Pasha. He asked for this transfer because he wished to teach in an institution whose student body reflected the diversity of the local population. It was during these years teaching in Tunis that he first cultivated an interest in Arab societies and their histories.
Beginning in 1951, André Raymond studied with the great French North Africanist Charles-André Julien, whose works contradicted the received wisdom about the European colonial enterprise and had an enormous professional and moral impact on Raymond. The same year, he was accepted, on Julien's recommendation, to the newly created St. Antony's College, Oxford. There, he completed a PhD in 1954 under the direction of the eminent historian Albert Hourani, with a thesis on "British Policy towards Tunis (1830-1881).â[euro] As a mark of respect for his erstwhile advisee, Hourani in 1990 published a retrospective of Raymond's work in the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (vols. 55-56, pp. 18-33).
Already in 1953, Raymond had been appointed a junior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He spent the following year in Damascus at the Institut Français d'Études Arabes de Damas (IFEAD), and 1955 at the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) in Cairo. He was a faculty member at the University of Tunis from 1957 to 1959 and from 1959 to 1966 headed the Department of Arab Studies at the University of Bordeaux before becoming the deputy director (1966-69)...