The death of Jacques Soustelle on August 7 in a suburb of Paris at the age of seventy-eight deprived France of one of its most accomplished (and controversial) public and cultural figures. Successively an anthropologist, soldier of the Liberation, Gaullist minister of information, governor-general of Algeria, anti-Gaullist revolutionary and then hunted refugee, member of the Chamber of Deputies, and finally, one of the “immortals” of the French Academy, Soustelle’s career was even more sensational and varied than that of André Malraux, with whom he shared the distinction of being both a man of letters and of action.
Born of Protestant parents in Montpellier in 1912, he received his agrégé in philosophy at the École normale supérieure and pursued postgraduate work in anthropology with Jean Rivet at the Musée de l’homme. Like many of the French intellectuals whose coming of age coincided with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Soustelle was drawn to the non-Communist (but essentially fellow-traveling) Left; he was active in various antifascist organizations, particularly the Union of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, created in 1938, of which he was secretary-general.
A deep interest in pre-Columbian civilizations led him to Mexico in 1939, where he did much of the research for his masterly Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest(1955; English translation, 1961). It was in Mexico, too, that he learned of the fall of France in 1940, rallied to de Gaulle, and became the latter’s representative for Latin America. Two years later he
