Hertz, Robert

Born in the family of a Jewish entrepreneur Adolf Hertz, who came from Germany and received French citizenship a year before the birth of his son. He graduated from the Lyceum of Henry IV (1900) and the Higher Normal School (1904) with a diploma in philosophy. Pupil of Emil Durkheim and Marcel Moss . Then, until 1906, he trained in the British Museum in London . Since 1905, published in the journal L'Année sociologique . Upon returning to France, he taught at the Lyceum and at the Practical School of Higher Studies . In 1915 he entered the second lieutenant in the 330th infantry regiment of the French army, was killed during the attack. Posthumously awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor for participating in hostilities.

The most famous works of Hertz are related to the sociology and anthropology of death: these are the expanded articles “The Collective Concept of Death” ( French La Représentation collective de la mort ; 1907) and “The Excellence of the Right Hand: A Study of Religious Polarity” ( French La prééminence de la main droite: Étude sur la polarité religieuse ; 1909), traditionally published together under the general title “Death and the Right Hand” (for example, in the 1960 English translation and in the 2019 Russian edition edited by S.V. Mokhov ) . Extensive fragments of Hertz’s unfinished doctoral dissertation “Sin and Atonement in Primitive Societies” ( French by Le péché et l'expiation dans les sociétés primitives ) have also been published.

He was married (since 1904) to a teacher Alice Bauer (1877-1927), the sister of , a well-known activist of French pre-school education. He had three older sisters and a younger brother, one of the sisters, the artist Cecil Hertz, a participant in the Autumn Salon , was married to a teacher and publisher .

• Robert Parkin. The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and its Legacy. - Routledge, 2012 .-- 244 pp.
• Nicolas Mariot. Histoire d'un sacrifice. Robert, Alice et la guerre. - Le Seuil, 2017 .-- 448 pp.