Bertrand de Jouvenel

Origins and early life

Bertrand de Jouvenel was born on 31 October 1903 in Paris, the son of the senator and diplomat Henry de Jouvenel and of Sarah Boas, daughter of a Jewish industrialist — the Jewish mother by whom he figures in this directory, as Britannica and the reference biographies record.

Work and career

This fiche states the shadows of his life as plainly as its achievements: at sixteen he became the lover of his stepmother, the novelist Colette, an affair that inspired her Le Blé en herbe. In the 1930s he joined Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français and edited its newspaper before breaking with it in 1938, and the historian Zeev Sternhell later counted him among the intellectuals drawn to fascism — a charge Jouvenel took to court in 1983, winning a partial and symbolic judgment.

His lasting work came after the war: Du pouvoir (1945), a history of the growth of state power, De la souveraineté and The Pure Theory of Politics made him one of the major political philosophers of the century, read by liberals and conservatives alike; and in 1960 he founded Futuribles, the first systematic enterprise of thinking about possible futures, with The Art of Conjecture (1964) as its charter — the birth of futures studies. He died in Paris on 1 March 1987.