Blackwell Reference Online

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On June 22, 1962, Georges Gurvitch and his wife Dolly were victims of a terrorist attack aimed at assassinating this deeply dedicated Sorbonne professor of sociology. He had enormous intellectual gifts and possessed a dazzling legal mind with a wonderfully creative sociological imagination. The distinguished social historian Fernand Braudel proclaimed him the brightest person he had ever known. Gurvitch found himself opposed to French groups such as the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète) seeking to keep Algeria a French colony. Students poured into Gurvitch's sociology classes from North and Sub-Saharan Africa longing for independence from their French occupiers. Freedom was in the air and Gurvitch favored decolonization. In all likelihood, then, it was OAS terrorists armed with plastic bombs who destroyed the Gurvitchs’ Paris apartment on that summer night in 1962, bringing paralyzing fear into their lives. They took refuge in the home of the celebrated painter Marc Chagall. The moral facts, those principles upon which Gurvitch acted, were centered in a commitment to liberate Algeria from French colonialism. Gurvitch headed an academic activist group at the University of Paris that viewed the brutal and bloody Algerian war as unjust. His leadership tells much about the sociology he taught and lived. The roots of this spontaneous act of creative freedom came from living through ... log in or subscribe to read full text