Suzanne Citron (1922–2018)

Suzanne Citron, née Grumbach, was born in Ars-sur-Moselle to a middle-class French Jewish family with Alsatian, Parisian and Portuguese roots. She studied at the Lycée Molière in Paris but her education was interrupted by the start of World War II. Her father was taken prisoner in Germany and two of her cousins were caught in a roundup of Jews. Suzanne illegally crossed the Nazi demarcation line on July 15, 1941 to enter the southern (so-called free) zone, where she pursued her studies in history and participated in Resistance activities.

She was arrested in Lyon in 1944 by the Gestapo and survived the last weeks of the war at the Drancy transit camp, being liberated by the Allies before her deportation to Germany. She earned a doctorate in contemporary history and taught for 20 years at the Lycée d'Enghien-les-Bains and then at the University of Paris XIII-Villetaneuse. Prof. Citron became a prominent historian known for her critiques of the national myth and the way history is taught in France. She published books such as L'École bloquée (The Blocked School, 1971) and wrote hundreds of essays and opinion pieces for Le Monde and Libération. A member of the French Socialist Party, she served as deputy mayor of Domont in the Val-d'Oise from 1977 to 1983. In 1987, she published her most famous book, Le Mythe national, which has gone through numerous editions, including Le mythe national: l'histoire de France revisitée, published in 2008. She was married to Pierre Citron, a musicologist and academic.