Robert Flacelière

Robert Flacelière was a scholar of Classical Greek. He was educated at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, the Lycée Henri IV and the École Normale Supérieure. From 1925 to 1930, he was a member of the French School in Athens and from 1932-1948 a Professor of the Faculty of Letters at University of Lyon. He was then appointed to the Chair of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Paris, a post he held until 1963 when he was appointed Director of the École Normale Supérieure.

Biography

After brilliant studies at the Lycée Henri-IV, he entered the École normale supérieure (Paris) in 1922, and passed the agrégation in grammar in 1925. That same year, he joined the French School at Athens, where his main interest was Epigraphy. His Doctorate thesis, defended in 1935 and published in 1937, was entitled Les Aitoliens à Delphes: contributions à l'histoire de la Grèce centrale au IIIe siècle av.J.-C.. He taught Greek language and literature at the Faculté des Lettres in Lyon, then at the Faculté des Lettres in Paris. In 1967, he was elected member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
During the student revolt of May 1968, Flacelière organized a petition of faculty members against the rebelling students and found himself at the center of a heated controversy.
He headed the École normale supérieure from 1963 to 1971. President Georges Pompidou, himself an alumnus of the school, put an end to his duties after Maoist groups occupied the school during the "Night of the Paris Commune". He then became director of the Fondation Thiers, from 1975 to 1980.
In February 1978, he was one of the founding members of the Comité des intellectuels pour l'Europe des libertés.
On his return from a Mediterranean cruise, he died on May 23 1982.