AP News, May 22nd, 2007
Eugen Weber, a noted writer and lecturer on French history and a former dean of UCLA's College of Letters and Science, has died. He was 82.
Weber died Thursday of pancreatic cancer at his home in Los Angeles, the university said.
An expert on modern French culture and politics, Weber focused more on the everyday facets of life than on historical theories in his writings and teachings.
"A lot of life," Weber once said, "is about things so trivial we do not bother to record them _ only sometimes to note their absence, as with manners."
His fascination with France's rural culture was stoked by a trip to the southwestern part of the country in the 1960s. The experience led to his 1976 book, "Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914," for which he was awarded American and French prizes.
"I thought I knew France when I lived in Paris," Weber said, "but in Bordeaux, I looked around me and realized there was another France. I realized there were a lot of Frances."
Many students were introduced to Weber through his 1971 textbook, "A Modern History of Europe," which became widely used on college campuses. In 1989, Weber was exposed to an even wider audience as host of "The Western Tradition," a 52-part documentary series on Western civilization produced by Boston public television station WGBH.
A member of UCLA's faculty since 1956, Weber served as dean from 1977 to 1982 and held a UCLA endowed chair in modern European history, which is now named for him.
He published more than a dozen books, which have been translated into more than half a dozen languages, dealing with subjects including anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust, fascism and intellectual history.
"Eugen Weber was a brilliant scholar with an elegant writing style, extremely wide-ranging interests and a wonderful sense of humor," said UCLA acting Chancellor Norman Abrams. "He was a stimulating teacher ... and an exceptional leader of our College of Letters and Science."
Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1925, Weber was educated in England. He served as an officer in the British Army during World War II and later studied history at Paris' Institut d'Etudes Politiques and Cambridge University. In 1950, he married a Frenchwoman, Jacqueline Brument-Roth, his only survivor.
Weber taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and the University of Iowa before heading to the University of California at Los Angeles.
