In Memory of John Merriman

I wrote a short essay about my friend and mentor John Merriman for a special section of the Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle. It appeared alongside lovely “hommages” by Michelle Perrot, Peter McPhee and Maya Jasanoff. Here is a version in English:

I met John Merriman for the first time in February, 1990. He had invited me to Yale for a job interview. To my surprise, he came to meet me himself at the New Haven train station, in his usual black leather jacket. His hair was uncombed, his shirt wrinkled, and the back seat of his car was covered with books, papers and food wrappers. In short, he did not exactly correspond to the image that I had a of a famous Yale professor, already the author of several classic works on nineteenth-century France. He did everything possible to put me at ease, chatting about his children, his wife, his students, and his beloved football team from the University of Michigan. If we had been speaking in French he would have called invited me to call him “tu” from the start. Thanks to him, the anxiety I had felt about the interview dissipated immediately. The visit went well, and I got the job.

Six months later I moved to New Haven. Needless to say, John was not there. The very idea of spending a single day of the summer vacation in the United States was entirely absurd to him. The summer was France: for the archives, and for the village of Balazuc, in the Ardèche, where the Merrimans had bought a lovely home. But as soon as he came back to Yale, he invited me over, to his apartment in Branford College, where I met the entire family. At the time, Yale, including the History Department, was a very hierarchical place. I was the youngest instructor, and untenured. Most of the full professors did not bother to get to know people at my level. But that wasn’t John Merriman. He treated everyone as an equal: his colleagues, his students, the staff. If anyone asked him for something, his response was always the same: “it would be an honor.”

This deep and instinctive sense of equality was not just a personal quality of John’s. It also suffused his work as a historian. In his books you cannot find the slightest trace of condescension for the French people whose traces he followed in the archives: not the “démoc-socs” who fought against the coup d’état of 1851, nor the workers of Limoges, nor the “terrorist” Émile Henry, nor the defenders of the Paris Commune, nor the villagers of Balazuc about whom he wrote with such tenderness.

This sense of equality was one of the three qualities which, to my eyes, distinguished John as both a historian and a person. The second was his implacable sense of justice. He never hesitated to express his forceful opinion, either in his life or his works. If he thought that his Yale colleagues had made a bad decision (and he thought so fairly often) he said so very directly. Some historians thought that his book about the Paris Commune of 1871 too often took on the tone of a brief in favor of the Communards and a denunciation of the “Versaillais.” But it was impossible for John to write the book otherwise. At one of the great moments of his professional life, receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from the American Historical Association in 2017, he raised his fist and shouted “Power to the People!” But despite the causes he obviously favored, he never twisted his sources to reach a predetermined conclusion. His conclusions were always well grounded.

The final quality which characterized him, entirely obvious to everyone who knew him, was enthusiasm. His appetites – for life, for history, and also for good food and drink – were enormous. It wasn’t enough for him to have worked in the majority of French departmental archives—he needed to have worked in all of them. He wrote at an almost frantic rhythm, always with loud rock music playing. In the time it would have taken me to write a chapter, he would write an entire book. But his enthusiasm was directed first and foremost towards his children, towards his beloved wife Carol, and towards his friends, and expressed itself above all as unbounded generosity. The night of the awarding of his prize, he invited all the friends who had come to the award ceremony to celebrate the occasion in his hotel room, with a case of champagne (or perhaps two, my memories are a little cloudy). In nearly all the memories I have of John Merriman, we were à table. Such a man, such a historian, leaves a great emptiness behind him.