Nora taught at the Lycée Lamoricière d'
Oran in Algeria from 1958 until 1960. He wrote a book about his experiences, published under the title ("The French of Algeria") (1961). In 1962, when the
Évian peace treaty was signed – later confirmed by a
subsequent referendum – which ended the
Algerian War, a ceasefire came into effect. Nora, despite not knowing a word of
Hebrew was asked to travel there and both look into the situation of
Algerian Jews and secure their archives for repatriation. He met
Ben Bella who, embracing him, asked Nora to sit by his side as his motorcade drove into Algiers the following day. Ben Bella was under the impression that Nora, whose account of Algeria he had read with admiration while in prison, was a member of the local Algerian Jewish community. During the same May week, he was stopped with several others by a group of insurgents and stood against a wall for execution, a fate avoided by the timely intervention of the local police. From 1961 to 1963, he was a resident at the
Fondation Thiers. From 1965 to 1977 he was first assistant and then lecturer at the (Paris Institute of Political Science). From 1977 he was the director of studies at the (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), holding the post for four decades. In 2014, Nora received the
Dan David Prize for his contribution to "History and Memory."
Publishing Concurrently, Nora had pursued an important career in publishing. He joined
Éditions Julliard in 1964, where he created the
Archives paperback collection. In 1965 he joined
Éditions Gallimard: the publishing house, which already had a good market share in literature, wanted to develop its
social sciences sector. It was Pierre Nora who achieved this mission by creating two important collections, the
Library of social sciences in 1966 and the
Library of histories in 1970, as well as the collection in 1967. At Éditions Gallimard, under Nora's direction many major works of scholarship were published that became landmarks in their respective fields, such as books by
Raymond Aron,
Michel Foucault,
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Georges Duby,
Georges Dumézil,
François Furet and,
Jacques Le Goff, and translations of books by
Elias Canetti,
Ernst Kantorowicz and
Thomas Nipperdey. This important role gave to Nora a certain power in French publishing and he was also the object of criticism. He declined to translate
Eric Hobsbawm's work,
The Age of Extremes (1994). Nora admired the book, admitted its high quality but after a long delay, turned it down, telling Hobsbawm that the high costs of translation would make its sale price prohibitive, and the French left itself, given the times, would be hostile. A further reason, Nora mentioned to a third party, was that the
Shoah by then had moved to the centre of cultural memory and the word
Auschwitz only appeared once in Hobsbawm's book. Publicly, he stated in 1997 that his rejection stemmed from the author's "attachment to the revolutionary cause". Nora explained that context of hostility towards Communism in France was not appropriate to that type of publication, that all the editors, "like it or not, had an obligation to take account of the intellectual and ideological situation in which they had written their works". == Intellectual life ==