When I was a PhD candidate in history at Harvard University, Stanley Hoffmann taught in a different department, political science. Even so, Stanley had more influence on me than any of my official advisors. He shaped profoundly the way I understood the Vichy regime, and he was essential to the publication in French translation of La France de Vichy in 1973.
Stanley’s intellectual guidance made itself felt in numerous ways. There was, first of all, his teaching. Most students at Harvard had never experienced classroom lectures like Stanley’s. Elevating his French training to an even higher level, Stanley constructed for each class an elegant framework in which hypotheses alternated with demonstrations (usually grouped in threes). It was dazzling. The Harvard students had a tradition of applauding at the end of the semester if they had enjoyed a course. In Stanley’s classroom, they applauded after every lecture. I never encountered another student response like that at any university.
There formed around Stanley a network of professors and graduate students from Harvard and MIT who gathered from time to time to hear and discuss a paper about twentieth-century France. There were Nicholas Wahl, Charles Kindleberger, visitors like Michel Crozier, and many others. There was probably no other place in the United States – or perhaps anywhere else outside of Paris – where the study of contemporary France was as intense or as sophisticated as it was in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of Stanley Hoffmann…