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Fabienne Bock (1944-2023): ”A woman who broke down barriers, a citizen against barriers”

With these words, the well-known French historian and feminist activist Michelle Perrot concluded her article dedicated to her colleague and friend, Fabienne Bock. The article, alongside other testimonies, appeared in the December 2023 issue of Raison présente, of which Bock was the main editor, to pay tribute to her memory.

An emeritus professor in contemporary history and historian of French parliamentarism, Fabienne Bock passed away in Paris on 2 November 2023. She was my doctoral supervisor, and I was her last PhD student.

On this day six years ago, I defended my dissertation at the University of Marne-la-Vallée in France and became a Doctor in History. Today, I dedicate this post to the memory of Fabienne Bock. Her career and commitment, her supervision of my research, and our friendship were all sources of inspiration.

Madame Bock—as I always called her, although to her colleagues she was simply Fabienne—began her career as a high school history teacher at the Lycée Jean Macé in Vitry-sur-Seine, in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris. Her career was shaped by the events in May 1968, the most important social movement in France in the 20th century, which began as a spontaneous anti-authoritarian student protest and quickly spread throughout the whole country as an egalitarian effort. Following the riots, in order to reduce the number of students in central Paris, the French government decided to create new universities, including Université Paris 7. Located on the Jussieu campus in the heart of the Rive gauche, Paris 7 was characterised by its multidisciplinary approach based on a tripartite alliance of medicine, science, and literature. Young historians joined the new university and, as it was short of staff, more professors were recruited, including Fabienne Bock.

Soon after her arrival in 1973, Bock and her female colleagues (Michelle Perrot, Pauline Schmitt) launched a course dedicated to women’s history called “Do women have a history?”. According to Michelle Perrot, the brand-new Université Paris 7 was a “fairly leftist and feminist university” and a defender of the MLF (Women’s Liberation Movement, which fought for women’s bodily autonomy and challenged patriarchal society). The institution was involved in the struggle for abortion rights after the Bobigny trial in 1972, which was a milestone in decriminalising abortions in France. Today, this is particularly relevant: on 4 March 2024, France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

The course on women’s history at Jussieu questioned unprecedented issues in French historiography. Michelle Perrot recalls: “What struck me was the silence of women and women in history. They were the great absentees from the historical narrative. Even the great Simone de Beauvoir, the revered author of Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), wrote that women had no history, that all women’s history had been made by men, thus confusing what happened (where women have always been) with the story we tell (where they are not): story and history, as the English say. Activism was not enough. It was necessary to question knowledge and its aporias, as Michel Foucault did about madness and prisons. We had to dismiss the shadows, break the silence, seek out and make women appear. Beyond that, we had to understand the evolution of male-female relations throughout history: a major subject that has almost never been tackled.”

Apart from contributing to opening the discourse on women’s history in France, Bock focused on political history, particularly conflicts and wars, which intersected with economic, personal, legal, and institutional history. She was also interested in the history of the Third World and the former colonies. In 1989, under the supervision of Michelle Perrot, she wrote her thesis for the third cycle (thèse de 3e cycle) on the French pedagogical movement led by Célestin Freinet during the interwar period. In 1998, she defended her doctoral thesis (thèse d’État) under the supervision of the French historian and politician Jean-Noël Jeanneney on the role and functioning of the French Parliament in 1914-1918. Her dissertation, published in French in 2002 (Un parlementarisme de guerre, 1914-1918) made her a specialist in WW1 and a pioneer in French parliamentary history. In recognition of her work, she was one of the speakers at the conference held by the French Senate on 19 June 2014 to commemorate the centenary of WW1.

In 1991, Fabienne Bock joined the newly created University of Marne-la-Vallée (today University Gustave Eiffel), a branch of Paris 7 in the eastern suburbs of Paris, which had been established alongside three other universities in the greater Paris region. She enthusiastically took up the challenge of teaching in an autonomous and innovative way for geographically and sociologically marginalised youth. From 1993, she directed the history major in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department while leading a small group of historians. In 1997, the university was given permanent status. Bock helped set up a small research unit in 2000, which was renamed “Comparative Analysis of Power” (Analyse comparée des pouvoirs) in 2003. Today, this multidisciplinary research unit has 36 members, 26 PhD students, and a number of associate members who share a common research focus on power.

My personal acquaintance with Madame Bock dates back to the spring of 2007. I was in my first year of research for my master’s degree in history, on a fellowship from the Île-de-France French Regional Council. My supervisor was Professor Georges Lomné, a long-time colleague of Bock, who had been her first PhD student at the University of Marne-la-Vallée back in 2002. However, Professor Lomné left for Lima, Peru, to head the French Institute of Andean Studies and asked his colleague to take me on. The first time I met her, she gave me a paper written on the cultural Cold War. Sixteen years later, I still have it with me.

Madame Bock appreciated the research I had begun on the under-researched Free Europe University in Exile. It was an American Cold War asset set up in France in 1951 to provide fellowships for young eastern European refugees and thus to train an intellectual elite in the event that the Soviet regime collapsed behind the Iron Curtain. During my second year of research for my master’s degree, she also invited me to join a research project that she was leading on the petitionary movements addressed to the French Assembly from 1815-1944.

After obtaining my master’s degree in history and settling in Paris at the end of 2009, Madame Bock strongly encouraged me to continue my research. Thanks to her support and a successful presentation before the Scientific Committee of the University of Paris-Est, I became a contractual PhD student in the “Comparative Analysis of Powers” research unit in October 2010. I was also awarded international mobility fellowships by my doctoral school and research unit to conduct research in the US while I presented papers at international conferences. Madame Bock, together with Madame Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, the director of the research unit at the time, supported me in applying for mobility grants and to access libraries and archives around the world.

Over the years, we became very close. Madame Bock knew my French husband and came to Budapest for our wedding. Her wedding gift was a print entitled “Le grand Louvre” (see below), painted by her friend and artist Pascale Hémery. Madame Bock, who was extremely generous, kind, and open, was at the same time very discreet and did not talk much about her private life. She confided to me at the wedding that her late husband was supposedly of Hungarian origins: his name “Caroli” was probably originally “Károlyi”. I knew her house, surrounded by a huge park in Rueil, and when she moved to her apartment on Île Saint Louis in Paris, we lived within walking distance of each other. I will never forget our conversations about politics, history, and research, her rich voice, and the smell of her cigars.

Meanwhile, my personal journey turned out to be more challenging than expected: I had my first child in 2013, I finished my law studies and became a lawyer in Hungary in 2015, and I moved to Munich in Germany in 2016 to follow my expatriate husband. Madame Bock always talked about Berlin and her friends living there, who were the witnesses at her wedding. She planned a visit to Munich, but her health problems and the challenges I faced in settling down and finishing my PhD overruled our plan. “A defended PhD is better than an unfinished one”, Professor Lomné told me with a smile, reminding me of Madame Bock’s motto when I enrolled for the last time. Finally, on 15 March 2018, I defended my doctoral dissertation. In recognition of her unconditional support, I offered Madame Bock a bouquet of roses.

We kept in touch over the following years, and I updated her on my professional activities. In the summer of 2019, I met the French historian François David through Ioana Cirstocea and Ioana Popa, who together ran a research seminar on the history of the Cold War. Professor David was very much interested in my work and suggested that I outline a postdoctoral research plan. This gave me the idea of launching my “University in Exile Research Project” on academics and academic institutions in exile in the 20th-21st centuries. However, personal circumstances postponed devoting myself to research until 2022.

In the summer of 2022, quite unexpectedly, I moved to Australia with my family. My renewed status as an expat, along with my academic background and my own personal commitment have led me to stand up in solidarity with those who have been forced to leave their country. I am currently using my rich experience to help young refugees apply for scholarships and gain access to higher education. I am also working as a researcher on the history of women’s rights under the supervision of Professor Susan Kneebone at the University of Melbourne. Moreover, I have recently been accepted as a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney where my research is devoted to academics and academic institutions in exile.

Although I couldn’t tell Madame Bock about this new chapter of my life in Australia, I have aligned my professional life with her humanitarian commitment. As she warned in her 2017 article—entitled “A Walled World” and published in Raison présente—we live in a world that is constantly open to the free movement of capital, but not of people, especially refugees, asylum seekers, and those fleeing economic misery. Her impact as a female scholar has had a major influence on my academic achievements, along with Éva Martonyi (PPKE-BTK), Katalin Kadar Lynn (Helena History Press), Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux-Lakits (EHESS), and Susan Kneebone (Melbourne Law School).

Veronika Durin-Hornyik, PhD


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Veronika Durin-Hornyik (March 15, 2024). Fabienne Bock (1944-2023): ”A woman who broke down barriers, a citizen against barriers”. University in Exile Research Project. Retrieved March 23, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/w0yq


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