From a background which he described as "uncultured", he took up archaeology and history by chance, at the age of eight, when he discovered a piece of an amphora on a Celtic site close to the village of Cavaillon.
Having come to Paris for his khâgne, he had a sudden moment of political awakening in front of the bas-relief that celebrates the liberation of the city at the bottom of the Boulevard St. Michel and joined the Communist Party of France.
[1] At a time when the dominant trend in French historiography favoured quantitative methods, Veyne's essay unabashedly declared history to be a "true tale".
[2] The book is a comprehensive study of the practice of gift-giving, in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, more in line with the anthropologically influenced histoire des mentalités of the third Annalistes generation than with "old-fashioned" narrative history.
[3] In 1975 Veyne entered the Collège de France thanks to the support of Raymond Aron, who had been abandoned by his former heir apparent Pierre Bourdieu.
"[7] In this essay Veyne moved away from the insistence on history as narrative and focused instead on how the work of Foucault constituted a major shift in historical thinking.