Robert Bonnaud

Robert Bonnaud (13 November 1929 – 22 January 2013) was a French anti-colonialist historian and professor of history at the Paris Diderot University.

In 1957, following the advice of his friend Pierre Vidal-Naquet, he published in Esprit an article entitled La Paix des Nementchas (Nementchas’ Peace), where he denounced massacres he witnessed made by the French army in Algeria, on the 25th and 26 October 1956. In June 1961, he was arrested and jailed in Marseilles' Baumettes prison as a supporter of the Algerian nationalists of the FLN; Hargreaves calls him "the leader of the Jeanson network in the Marseilles region". In June 1962, two months after the Evian agreements and the proclamation of Algeria's independence, Bonnaud was released but suspended from all teaching duties. That restriction was lifted two years later and he was formally pardoned in 1966.

Bonnaud was born in Marseilles, France. He dedicated his life to the study of universal history, and has been presented as a "meta-historian", a "philosopher of history", a theorist of the evolution of the noosphere. He died, aged 83, in Paris.