John Merriman, Eminent Historian of France, Is Dead at 75

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/books/john-merriman-dead.html

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John Merriman, a revered professor of history at Yale University who plumbed dozens of French governmental archives for the information that invigorated his fast-paced books about anarchists, terrorists, leftists and ordinary people in France, died on May 22 in New Haven, Conn. He was 75.

The cause was complications of bladder cancer and multiple myeloma, his daughter, Laura Merriman, said.

Professor Merriman spent nearly all his teaching career at Yale, a rumpled figure who used his storytelling gifts to animate his lectures on French and European history.

“It was a kind of wonderful, managed chaos,” Judith Coffin, a professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, who was among Professor Merriman’s first graduate students, said by phone. “He’d walk in with a few crumpled pieces of paper, walk back and forth, jump from one subject to another, and after two or three hours you’d really gotten somewhere.”

The author Ta-Nehisi Coates watched some of Professor Merriman’s recorded lectures online and described him in The Atlantic in 2013 as a “kind of freestyle rapper” who riffed off his material — anecdotes, quotes and observations — and “had this weird ability to inhabit the history.”

Professor Merriman approached the research and writing of his books with a similar goal: to avoid approaching 19th- and 20th-century French social and political history dryly.

In “The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror” (2009), Professor Merriman examined the origins of contemporary terrorism through the life of Emile Henry, a young intellectual anarchist. In 1894, Henry entered a cafe in Paris, ordered two beers, got up to leave, removed a bomb from his overcoat pocket, lit the fuse with his cigar and tossed it toward the 350 patrons. One person was killed; 20 more were wounded.

“This was the first modern terrorist act,” Professor Merriman wrote. “It represented something new and frightening in the world: An attack on innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Patrick Chura, a professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Akron, wrote in his review of “The Dynamite Club” in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism in 2011 that Professor Merriman did not fully prove the link between Henry (whose act inspired other bombings) and modern terrorism. But he praised him for writing a book that reads “like a novel, using meticulous archival research not so much to persuade as to bring to life his subject and the world he lived in.”

Professor Merriman’s next book, “Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune” (2014), was an account of the two months in 1871 when a left-wing, working-class collective known as the Commune governed Paris until being crushed, with thousands of Communards massacred, by the French army.

“I wanted to write about Bloody Week,” he said in 2014 on an online Yale video interview show, referring to the bloody final days of the Commune. “Writing about death isn’t a barrel of laughs, but these were some admirable people.”

Reviewing “Massacre” in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote that it “could be among the most passionate accounts of a distant historical episode that the reader is likely to encounter from an American academic,” particularly because of the way Professor Merriman drew the members of the Commune as complicated people and “not set-piece proletarian heroes.” But he criticized Professor Merriman’s “single-minded” advocacy of the Communards.

John Mustard Merriman was born on June 15, 1946, in Battle Creek, Mich., and raised in Portland, Ore. His mother, Sally Mustard, a portrait and landscape painter, raised him. He did not know his father, Robert Merriman, who was divorced from his mother when John was 2.

John got an early start on being a historian: At 11 or 12, he started writing a world history (working in alphabetical order, he made it though E). He also received, as birthday gifts from his mother’s friends, books by the historians Henry Steele Commager and Henri Pirenne. But he didn’t get too far in those books; an athlete, he was more interested in reading Sports Illustrated.

At the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in history (and where he developed a passion for the football team), he was interested in Asian studies. It wasn’t until graduate school, also at Michigan, that he shifted to French history, influenced by the sociologist Charles Tilly, author of “The Vendée,” a study of counterrevolution in France.

While researching his dissertation at the National Archives in Paris, he received a carton packed with documents about an uprising by porcelain workers in Limoges in the spring of 1848. “I held in my hands real reports tendered by the prefect of Haute-Vienne, by the procureur général of Limoges and by local gendarmes,” he wrote in an essay in “History on the Margins: People and Places in the Emergence of Modern France” (2018).

“I distinctly remember thinking,” he wrote, “‘I will indeed have a dissertation.’”

He received his Ph.D. in 1972 and joined Yale as an assistant professor the next year.

That early archival experience gave him a vivid taste of the research he came to love. Digging into the well-preserved archives of 90 administrative departments around the country was “an excellent way of getting to know so much of France,” he told the French History Network Blog in 2017.

Those archives deeply informed his other books, including “Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Époque Paris” (2017) and “The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851” (1978). He also wrote a textbook, “A History of Modern Europe From the Renaissance to the Present” (1996).

In 2017, he received the American Historical Association’s lifetime award for scholarly distinction.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Merriman is survived by a son, Christopher. His wife, Carol (Payne) Merriman, died in 2016.

Professor Merriman lived in North Haven, Conn., but France was his second home. In 1987, he and his wife bought a house — a mixture of elements from the 11th and 13th centuries — in the medieval village of Balazuc, perched above the Ardèche River. He spent about one-third of his time there and wrote a book about the village’s history, “The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time” (2002).

“I think that was the book that mattered the most to him,” said David Bell, a history professor at Princeton, whom Professor Merriman hired and mentored at Yale. “The minute the Yale semester was over, he headed there, sat around in cafes and talked to people into the small hours.”