Edgar Morin is 104 years old. I could say that he is an intellectual who witnessed the last century, but that would only be half true. The French sociologist, also a philosopher and historian, above all a great thinker, was also an actor of that century, especially because as a young man he took up arms and went to the maquis fight the German invader. Then he fought through writing, as when he took sides with Mário Soares, an old friend, during the Portuguese revolutionary period: “when there was the Carnation revolution and he had difficulties because there was a communist attempt to seize power, I wrote a great article to defend Mário Soares in France. Because many in France said that the Portuguese didn’t need freedom, they needed bread. And I said that you have to have bread and you have to have freedom”.
Morin, who became a communist but left in revolt against Stalinism, told me about this episode in an interview I did with him two years ago. He then came to Lisbon to give a lecture “The Atlantic – The New Charter of Humanism” and also to be decorated by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa with the Grand Cross of the Order of Infante D. Henrique. He traveled with his wife, the French-Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam. And with him, at the Belém Palace, and later in the Fundação Oriente auditorium, there were also two friends, Isabelle de Oliveira, professor at the Sorbonne-Paris III University and president of the Instituto do Mundo Lusófono, and Manuel José Guerreiro, president of Caixa de Crédito Agrícola Mútuo de Torres Vedras, who a few months ago published an emotional chronicle in DN with the title “The day Edgar Morin asked me to be his friend”.
I learned from this chronicle how much Morin appreciated being given Madeira wine and Serpa cheese to taste. Proof of how the great French thinker loves life. When he said goodbye, after participating in a ceremony at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia and giving the interview, he told me that he was going to a fado house. You don’t need to do the math: he was 102 years old at that time.
I’m writing about Morin, a descendant of Sephardic Jews whose real surname is Nahum, because another book, ‘Lições da História’, has just been published in Portugal. It is organized into small chapters, each dedicated to a lesson, and is as intense as it is delightful to read. Here is an example of the first of the lessons: “the result of an action can be contrary to its initial intention”. He says he learned it from Georges Lefebvre, professor of History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, in his first year at the university, in 1940: “To recover the power lost during the reign of Louis and the clergy, to the detriment of the Third Estate. Now, at the beginning of the States General, in May 1789, the deputies of the Third Estate managed to have the votes counted by head and not by state. As their voters were more numerous, on June 17, 1789, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, and the Revolution was able to begin, thus losing the power it hoped to regain, and Louis XVI, in turn, wanting a reform. financial situation, he lost everything.”
Centuries-old wisdom, Edgar Morin’s look at History to help us understand the world we live in. “Can we learn from our past?”
Deputy Director of News Diary