Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), whose works became classics in the humanities and social sciences due to his relentless effort to decompartmentalize knowledge, produced a unique oeuvre, in which his Christian faith inspired without limiting his historical and anthropological insights into contemporary culture.

Though he was often associated with other thinkers of his generation, such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Louis Marin, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) holds a position in the landscape of contemporary French culture that is remarkable in two respects. Systematically refusing to be identified with the many disciplines that he passed through in the humanities and social sciences (including history, philosophy, theology, semiology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology), this Jesuit intellectual, who managed to gain recognition in both religious and non-religious academic circles (he taught at the Paris Catholic Institute, but also in the Parisian universities of Jussieu and Vincennes, as well as at San Diego in California, where, before being appointed professor in 1978, he ran a seminar on cultural anthropology for seven years; in 1984, he joined the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales as a professor) was noteworthy for his ability to navigate between various domains and disciplines. This distance is indicative of his relationship with institutional contexts, the operating bases from which he disseminated knowledge. These particularities left their mark on his work, which aspired to be as fragmentary and dispersed as the spaces of knowledge he traversed.

Certeau, who was not content merely to bring religious studies out of its ecclesiastical confines, helped to renew the humanities and social sciences with his article on “popular culture,” [1] written with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, which became the starting point for an anthropologically based cultural history, and an essay addressing the themes of the historian as a social actor, historical practice as a scientific operation, and the relationship between history and psychoanalysis. [2] The anthropology of everyday life, which has since become a major field, is deeply indebted to him.

From the Academy to Autonomy

Born in Chambéry in 1925 and raised in a family of small provincial aristocrats who were strict Catholics, Michel de Certeau completed his primary and secondary education as a boarder at two religious schools. Between 1943 and 1950, he obtained two undergraduate degrees at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Grenoble: one in classical letters (Certeau showed a preference for Greek), the other in philosophy. He also attended Jean Baruzi’s seminar on the history of religion at the Collège de France. These lectures would influence his research on seventeenth-century mysticism. While simultaneously following this secular curriculum, Certeau, in 1943, began to train for the priesthood at the Grand Seminary of Chambéry and with the Society of Priests of Saint Sulpice at Issy-les-Moulineaux. After a vocational crisis in 1945 and 1946, and a clear decision that he would not pursue a career in the church, he earned a degree in scholastic philosophy. At Issy, Certeau discovered the “new theology” at the University Seminar of Lyon Fourvière, the primary figure of which was the Jesuit Henri de Lubac, who later participated in the Second Vatican Council. In 1950, Certeau joined the Society of Jesus. Even at this time, his trajectory testified to a desire to connect history to experience and tradition to modernity.

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