Philippe Ariès had a passionate and disrespectful way of writing history. Marginalized for a long time from the university, he felt free to undermine the most entrenched convictions and tear down the best established authorities. History for him was not an academic discipline of cold objects and dead knowledge. If it was the intellectual passion of his life, it was because it allowed him to understand why today's men and women are what they are. All his work is guided by the will to date and characterize the fundamental mutations that defined our particular way of being with others, of loving and suffering, of appropriating death or making it something strange. To make it. Aries embarked on a long journey, through time and sources, in search of lost gestures and forgotten feelings that our present no longer recognizes. The essays that make up this book are still stages, provisional and unsatisfied, within this demanding search. Between the first book of a thirty-year-old and the last one dedicated to the one who had just died, the road became increasingly difficult and less safe, but he never got lost. Now it is up to us to retake it

Roger Chartier