HALBWACHS, MAURICE

HALBWACHS, MAURICE (1877–1945), French sociologist. In social psychology he investigated the problems of memory considered as a social fact and the influence of collective memory and tradition on beliefs, and traced the delicate interconnections between psychology and sociology. He combined an avid concern with sociographic investigation in various fields with his strong bent for theorizing in works on demographical statistics, on which subject he contributed to the Encyclopédie Française. He taught at the universities of Caen, Strasbourg, and Paris (after 1935), and a few months before his deportation and murder by the Nazis he was nominated to occupy the chair of social psychology at the College de France. He perished in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Among his works were La théorie de l'homme moyen: Essai sur Quetelet et la statistique morale (1913), Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925, 19522), L'évolution des besoins dans les classes ouvrières (1933), Morphologie sociale (1934), Esquisse d'une psychologie des classes sociales (in Enquêtes Sociologiques…, 1938; repub. posthum., 1955; The Psychology of Social Class, 1958), La topographie légendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte (1941),   Psychologie collective (1942), and Mémoire et Société (1949), posthumous. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexandre, in: Année Sociologique, 1 (1949), 3–10; Cuvielier, in: J.S. Roucek, Contemporary Sociology (1958), 716ff.; G. Gurvitch and E. Moore (eds.), Twentieth Century Sociology (1945). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Baudelot and R. Establet, Maurice Halbwachs: consommation et société (1994); G. Namer, Halbwachs et la mémoire sociale (2000); A. Becker, Maurice Halbwachs: un intellectuel en guerres mondiales, 1914–1945 (2003). (Ephraim Fischoff)