Maurice Halbwachs was born on 11 March 1977 in Reims. After studying philosophy under, among others, Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim, Halbwachs passed the state exam in 1901, after which he studied for a year at the University of Göttigen and then worked as a secondary school teacher. In 1909, he completed a doctorate in law, which was followed in 1913 by a doctorate in sociology. In 1913, he married Yvonne Basch, daughter of the Jewish philosopher and professor of germanistics Victor Basch (1863–1944) and his wife Hélène (1863–1944). Halbwachs and Basch had two sons together.
From 1919 to 1935, Halbwachs taught at the Université de Strasbourg. In 1921, he took on a teaching position at the »Centre d’études germaniques« in Mainz, located in the French-occupied zone of the Rhineland. In 1932, he worked for a year as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and was appointed to the Sorbonne in 1935 before finally being appointed to a chair in social psychology at the prestigious Collège de France in 1944.
Because of his socialist convictions and for sheltering his two sons, who were active in the Resistance, Halbwachs was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris on 23 July 1944 and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. He died there on 16 March 1945 of an illness resulting from his imprisonment.
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