Draft:Christian Amalvi

Christian Amalvi (born 23 April 1954) is a French archivist, historian and academic whose work spans contemporary historiography. He was a lecturer at the Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier from 1991 to 2023.

Life
Born in Montauban, Occitania, Southern France, he attended the École nationale des chartes from 1974 to 1978, graduating as an archivist-palaeographer. He became a curator at the Bibliothèque nationale de France from 1978 to 1991.

He taught at the Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier from 1991 to 1998 and in 1994, wrote his doctoral thesis entitled L'Histoire pour tous: la Vulgarisation historique d'Augustin Thierry à Ernest Lavisse, 1814 - 1914 (lit. 'History for all: the popularisation of history from Augustin Thierry to Ernest Lavisse, 1814 - 1914') He was made a professor of contemporary history after Charles-Olivier Carbonell, who was his doctoral supervisor. On retiring in January 2023, he is a member of the Académie des sciences et lettres de Montpellier.

Work
Amalavi's 1978 thesis at the École des Chartes was entitled La « galerie des hommes illustres » de l'histoire de France dans l'enseignement primaire de 1833 à 1914 (The "Gallery of Famous Men" from French history in primary education from 1833 to 1914. In 1979 he used that thesis to publish his first work dedicated to the iconography of scholarly heroes in French history during the Third Republic, analysing that iconography as part of a national mythology.

In 1988 Amalvi published a book entitled De l'art et la manière d'accommoder les héros de l'histoire de France, made up of seven different studies on the representation of heroes and of historical episodes in national history in the 19th and 20th centuries. His 1996 work Le goût du Moyen Âge examined the historiographical destiny of major figures from the Middle Ages and examined the public's interest in that period, which he associated initially with history teaching at primary level. In 2001 he published Répertoire des auteurs de manuels scolaires et de livres de vulgarisation historique de langue française de 1660 à 1960

Amalvi was also a member of the Haut comité des commémorations nationales, established in 1998 as the Haut comité aux célébrations nationales He and nine other members of that committee (Marie-Laure Bernadac, Gilles Cantagrel, Nicole Garnier, Claude Gauvard, Robert Halleux, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Évelyne Lever, Pascal Ory and Jacques Perot) resigned in a joint open letter published in Le Monde in March 2018. He also protested against the Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen's decision to remove Charles Maurras's name from the Livre des commémorations nationales 2018.

In 2004 he edited the Dictionnaire biographique des historiens français et francophones.