Une histoire qui fait l’Histoire : la mort de Maurice Halbwachs à Buchenwald

A story that made history : the death of Maurice Halbwachs in Buchenwald. To understand the tragic death of Maurice Halbwachs, 60 years ago in mid-March 1945 in Buchenwald concentration camp, it is necessary to compare the interests and the working methods of this intellectual with the representations, beliefs and ideas on the world of those who sentenced him to death. Everything shows that Maurice Halbwachs was assassinated because he believed in the rationalist philosophy of knowledge inherited from Cartesianism and the Age of Enlightenment, because he had been a supporter of Dreyfus and had always refused anti-Semitism, because he had put his knowledge at the service of a right protecting collective solidarity against the threat of capitalist, economic forces, because his sociological and demographic work deconstructed the myth of an imaginary pure and superior “ race”, because he knew all about the haphazardness of social hierarchies, because he considered that sociology in Germany, entangled as it was in a vague romanticism and a condemnation of contemporary social forms, was on the wrong path, because, quite simply, he practised a sociology aimed at tolerance and emancipation which perturbed and incited the hatred of all the proponents of the Order.