Simon Nora (21 February 1921 – 5 March 2006) was a senior functionary in the post-war French state administration, who served in several French cabinets and was the Inspecteur-general in the Ministry of Finance.
Simon Nora | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 5 March 2006 | (aged 85)
Education | Lycée Janson-de-Sailly |
Alma mater | École Libre des Sciences Politiques École nationale d'administration |
Occupation | Civil servant |
Relatives | Pierre Nora (brother) |
Nora was the eldest son of Gaston Nora, head of urology at the Rothschild Hospital. The family was secular, fully integrated into the Parisian Jewish bourgeoisie.[1] His youngest brother is the historian Pierre Nora. During WW2, his father, who had formed a friendship with the influential Pétainist Xavier Vallat dating back to their days together in the trenches in World War I[a] remained in Paris[b] while sending his family away to avoid persecution and deportation. Simon joined the French Resistance in 1942, and was active in the areas of Jura and Vercours.[2] After the armistice he frequented members of the former Vichy School of Uriage, which, after the régime had dissolved it, attracted numerous promising youths, who shared a contempt for the Third Republic and an intense desire to develop a new model for France.[3]
In 1947, he married Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac, despite his own father's concerns, and humiliating efforts by his future father-in-law, the Duke de Cossé-Brissac, to block their marriage on the grounds of Nora's social inferiority. They had two children, Fabrice and Constance, before their marriage ended in 1955.[4] In 1953 he became economics expert for the newly-founded centre-left weekly L'Express [5] He then married Léone Georges-Picot, secretary and chief of staff of Pierre Mendès France's government.[5]
Acknowledged as a brilliant administrative functionary, Nora was close to Mendès France,[5] an association that, according to his brother Pierre, became a recurrent obstacle throughout his later career under Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac.[6] He was asked by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had once been Léone Nora's fiancé,[c] to write on the impact of the new communications technology on France. The report, The Computerization of Society, co-written with Alain Minc, appeared in 1978[7][8] and became a best-seller in France. The report was one of the first to propose an information highway, one result of which was the Minitel program.[9]
In his later years, while working desultorily on a massive treatise that aspired to be a kind of Kapital of the 20th century,[10] he studied Judaism together with Buddhism. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 without completing his book.[6] Widely admired, his memory as a modernizer was commemorated a decade later with a posthumous Festschrift in his honour, Simon Nora: moderniser la France.[11][12]