The historian Philippe Contamine was an institution in France.

At first he had difficulties distinguishing himself from his father, Henry Contamine, probably the best-known French military historian and politician of the post-war period.

His books on French "revenge" policy after 1871 and the victory on the Marne were until recently part of basic historical knowledge in France.

But Philippe Contamine's major thesis on war in the Middle Ages in 1980 not only earned him an appointment to the Sorbonne, but also admission to the Académie des inscriptions et belleslettres, an unusual honor for a historian.

The fact that he was even elected a member of the Académie Française in 2010 was not least due to his extremely careful dealings with the people of the Middle Ages.

If the great program of the Annales school to create a "History of Mentalities" could be realized, then it was in the work of this man, who spent his life tracing what Marc Bloch, the progenitor of the Annales, called the "way how people felt and thought”.

Instrumentalization of the national heroine

Philippe Contamine also served as editor of comprehensive histories of war and society in the Middle Ages and early modern period.

His reserved friendliness impressed colleagues and listeners.

This medievalist was also well versed in the intellectual and literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as his articles on the instrumentalization of the national heroine Joan of Arc by conservative and fascist groups show.

It was not until 1985 that Contamine came into contact with Joan of Arc, to whose name his research will be deeply linked in the future, when he took over the management of the Center Joan of Arc in Orléans, succeeding Régine Pernoud “ pushed out a strong wave of Jeanne research. Its best result is the encyclopedia on this great French heroine, which he published in 2012 with two younger medievalists, Olivier Bouzy and Xavier Hélary.

Philippe Contamine had no problems with the German language.

He has written many reviews of German works on the Middle Ages and the early modern period, mostly in "Francia", the journal of the German Historical Institute in Paris, which has been very topical for several years.

He was also a constant communicative guest at the institute's events and acted as a strong mediator between German and French historians.

Unfortunately, only very few of his publications have been translated into German, especially his "War in the Middle Ages" would have deserved it.

A translation of his last major work, the biography of King Charles VII (2017), who, after difficult beginnings, was finally able to gradually drive the English out of France, would also be desirable, so that he was revered for centuries as "Charles the Victorious".

Philippe Contamine died in Paris on Wednesday this week.

He was 89 years old.