Born in Paris on 27 March 1927 into a wealthy family, Furet was a bright student who graduated from the Sorbonne with the highest honors and soon decided on a life of research, teaching and writing.
In 1966, Furet began work at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he would later be president (from 1977 to 1985).
He became the leader of the revisionist school of historians who challenged the Marxist account of the French Revolution as a form of class struggle.
[5] From 1995 until his death on 12 July 1997 in Figeac, Furet's views about totalitarianism led to a debate via a series of letters with the German philosopher Ernst Nolte.
[9] Furet, an ex-French Communist Party member, published his classic[citation needed] La Révolution Française in 1965–1966.
It marked his transition from revolutionary left-wing politics to moderate centre-left position and reflected his ties to the social-science-oriented Annales School.
[11] Looking at modern French communism, he stressed the close resemblance between the 1960s and 1790s, with both favoring the inflexible and rote ideological discourse in party cells where decisions were made unanimously in a manipulated direct democracy.
He saw Revolutionary France as located ideologically between two revolutions, namely the first egalitarian one that began in 1789 and the second the authoritarian coup that brought about Napoleon's empire in 1799.
[12] Working much of the year at the University of Chicago after 1979, Furet also rejected the Annales School with its emphasis on very long-term structural factors and emphasized intellectual history.
Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin, Furet argues that Frenchmen must stop seeing the Revolution as the key to all aspects of modern French history.