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About the Author
François Furet, until his death in July 1997, was director of the Institut Raymond Aron at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and also a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In March 1997, he had been elected a member of the Académie Française. An eminent historian who wrote a number of pathbreaking books on the French Revolution, he was also the author of Le passé d’une illusion (1995), a widely discussed study of the idea of communism in the twentieth century.