Henri Bergson

Origins and early life

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on 18 October 1859, the second of seven children of Michał Bergson, a Polish Jewish composer and pianist, and of Katherine Levison, a Yorkshire doctor's daughter; both of his parents were Jewish, and he received a Jewish religious education as a boy.

Work and career

After the Lycée Condorcet he entered the École normale supérieure in 1878, passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1881 and taught in the lycées of Angers, Clermont-Ferrand and Paris. His doctoral thesis, published in 1889 as Time and Free Will, set time as consciousness lives it, which he called duration, against time as physics measures it; Matter and Memory followed in 1896. From 1900 to 1921 he held a chair at the Collège de France, where his lectures drew such crowds that moving them to the Opéra was seriously proposed, and Creative Evolution, in 1907, made him famous far beyond philosophy.

Elected to the Académie française on 12 February 1914, he met President Wilson on missions to the United States during the First World War, and from 1921 to 1926 presided over the League of Nations commission for intellectual cooperation.

Recognition

He alone received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1927, awarded in 1928 in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented; rheumatism kept him from Stockholm.

Later years

In his last years he felt drawn to Catholicism, yet chose not to be baptised: he would have converted, he said, had he not seen a great wave of antisemitism gathering for years, and he wished to stay among the persecuted. At the end of 1940, aged eighty-one and gravely ill, he refused the exemption from the anti-Jewish laws that Vichy offered him and had himself registered as a Jew. He died of bronchitis in occupied Paris on 4 January 1941; at his request a Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral, and he lies in the cemetery of Garches.