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Eric Hazan, Publisher and Historian on France’s Left, Dies at 87
He elevated many of France’s most provocative writers through his publishing house, La Fabrique, but he made his greatest mark as a politically engaged, and strolling, historian of Paris.
Eric Hazan, an influential publisher who brought to France’s attention some of the country’s most incendiary left-wing writers and who was himself a distinctive historian of Paris, died there on June 6. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by the publishing house he founded, La Fabrique, which released no other details. Mr. Hazan had been treated for cancer.
From an old building in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, Mr. Hazan’s tiny firm wielded an outsize influence, publishing provocative writers like the leftist philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, the scholar Edward Said and the historian Enzo Traverso.
La Fabrique has tackled colonialism, the rights of Palestinians, Israeli politics and the Holocaust, all guided by the hostility that Mr. Hazan, a son of immigrant Jews who had been forced into hiding during World War II, felt for capitalism, ethnocentrism and all forms of nationalism.
But it was as a politically engaged historian of Paris that Mr. Hazan made his greatest mark, writing a series of passionate and erudite historical guides to the city he loved but whose future he feared for, at least one of which won wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mr. Hazan could read the streets of Paris like few others, unearthing the historical significance of street signs, plaques on buildings, dents in a wall and what he called the “psychogeography” of entire neighborhoods.
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