Philip G. Nord received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, and in the following decades established himself as one of the leading figures in French social, political, and cultural history.
His first book, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (1986), is a model for the social history of political movements, investigating with nuance what drove small businesses in Paris away from republican ideals and toward right-wing extremism. He followed that with The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (1995), a masterful study of how the richness of civil society under the Second Empire bequeathed the Third Republic with resilient democratic institutions. The book’s sweeping analysis tackled a diversity of communities—from Freemasons and lawyers to religious figures and painters, to the latter of which Nord then dedicated another book, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2000). While during the first half of his career Nord focused on investigating the ruptures and continuities that marked the transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic, during the second half he turned to the transition from Vichy to the Fourth Republic. In 2010, he published France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the book traced how the strong activist state that defined France during the Trente Glorieuses did not emerge ex-nihilo from the rubble of World War II but had its origins in experiments developed in the latter years of the Third Republic and the Vichy era. He followed with France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015), a revisionist synthesis that challenges the view that France’s catastrophic defeat in World War II was overdetermined. His most recent book is After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France (2020), a richly textured study of the competing narratives that emerged to make sense of Vichy’s criminal deportation of Jews and résistants during World War II. Nord’s numerous books and articles (many of which have been translated into French) are only part of the story.
His career is also marked by a commitment to institutional governance and mentorship. He was Chair of the History Department from 1995 to 2001 and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 2012 to 2016. He began teaching a Princeton University in 1981 and has since shepherded countless undergraduate and graduate students who went on to become major scholars of modern French history in their own right.
