Robert Forster (1926-2020)
We were deeply saddened to learn that Dr. Robert Forster, professor emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, passed away on 12 May at the age of 93. The cause of death was congestive heart failure. Academics seldom are so universally admired as was Robert Forster. He was an intellectual guide, a mentor, an interlocutor and his students found upon finishing the degree, he was a loyal friend and booster. Never intrusive, he helped and consulted with his students as they moved from novices to positions within the professoriate.
Born in 1926, Bob was one of the “Greatest Generation” who fought in WWII as a very young man. Upon returning, he earned his BA from Swarthmore College, followed by a MA in Modern European History at Harvard in 1951. During his dissertation research in Toulouse, he met his future wife, Elborg Hamacher, who would become a sought-after translator and noted scholar in her own right. They married in 1955 in France after navigating the complicated French bureaucracy for the necessary paperwork, and became the parents of two sons, Marc and Thomas. After receiving his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1956, Bob taught at the University of Nebraska and Dartmouth College before returning to Hopkins in1966 as professor of history until his retirement in 1996. He was awarded many fellowships and honors over the course of his illustrious career; most notably, he was made Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Toulouse in 1985, and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1994 .
A gifted teacher and beloved graduate adviser, his anchor was his love of history, particularly French history of the revolutionary era. Before World War II, historians in the United States seldom wrote French history as it was published in France. Although fine studies emerged, the Americans tended to be outside the main focus of historical scholarship in France which, influenced to some extent by Marxist theory, increasingly concentrated on establishing the social causes of the revolution through intensive investigations and reconstructions of French society in the eighteenth century.
After World War II, a small band of young historians including George V. Taylor, David Bien, Richard Cobb, as well as Bob himself began to follow French trends. Even so, the Anglo-Americans still tended to eschew Marxist understandings, especially their somewhat deterministic nature of this work, and they generally sought to consider how a broader notion of society helped explain the unexpected explosion in 1789.
Bob was an absolutely key participant in spreading the influential approach of French social historians, while still inflecting it with his own views. His dissertation, which in 1960 became his first book, studied the nobility of Toulouse. Although social explanations for the revolution had become a major explanatory factor, often French scholarship treated the nobles much as the revolutionaries had: they were economically exhausted and dependent on status and privilege. Yet, Bob showed definitively that at least in Toulouse the nobility had learned how to expand its sources of income. In fact, not only did nobles squeeze the peasantry harder, they also were investing speculatively in venal offices and public securities. In short, the revolution did not topple a decaying class, as Marxism would have it, but one that had imbibed thoroughly the techniques of an educated elite strategy and an aggressive desire to maximize income without reference to its source – be it traditional or commercial.
Not only was Bob part of an entirely new wave of scholarship, he was an ambassador. What was commonplace for him – pursuing research in provincial archives and learning about the provinces instead of the capital – encouraged others, including many of his students, to head for the more challenging but also rewarding, repositories far from Paris. Bob also endeavored to bring the French approach directly to the Hopkins history professors and students. One of these eminent scholars, Jacques Godechot, in a very memorable visit, systematically explained to American students exactly how the Archives nationales was organized. Bob and Elborg expanded the spread in America of French social history in a series of articles from the prestigious Annales, economies, sociétés et civilizations, translated and edited with Patricia Ranum and Orest Ranum.
Bob’s scholarship continued with two more monographs on the upper range of French Old Regime society that added considerable depth to our knowledge of the fate of elites in the eighteenth century and revolution. As an early practitioner of family history as it grew out of the history of social groups, Bob wrote The House of Saulx-Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700-1830 (1971), and Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Depont Family in Eighteenth-Century France (1980). Through a focus on family strategies – education, marital, and career choices for offspring – he developed rich case studies. His diligent mining of family letters and financial documents broke important ground by showing social mobility and wealth formation by nobles and wealthy commoners. He illustrated these efforts by beautifully told stories, in particular the extraordinary efforts by the Duchess in the Saulx-Tavanes family to reconstitute the family estate which had been seized as the family went into exile. It took decades and the help of the former estate manager to realize the family ambition. Bob’s second and third books demonstrated beyond doubt the tenacity and resourcefulness of elite families in the face of political and social challenges.
As French history shifted from the metropole to the wider Francophone world, Bob stayed abreast of new currents in the field. He changed his focus to the study of the French colonies and race, while maintaining an interest in the study of family. This was a natural progression; the Depont family of La Rochelle, the subject of Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates, owed its fortune in part to patriarch Paul Depont’s heavy involvement in the slave trade. Bob was bemused by the fact that while “The slaves who died by the scores on the Saint-Louis or the Victoire in the 1730s and 1740s did not trouble” the conscience of Paul Depont’s son, his father’s usurious practices, contrary to canon law, did. He turned his attention to plantation society in his final book, co-edited with Elborg, examining the papers of a nineteenth-century slave owner in the French Antilles: Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808–1856 (1996). His interest in the psychology of white supremacy, often masked by the familial language of “paternalism,” undergirded his work, as he explored the violence that upheld the hierarchies of race and class in Creole society in his and Elborg’s introduction to Dessalles’ diary and correspondence.
During his thirty years at Johns Hopkins University, Bob retained the respect and affection of his colleagues in the history department, forging an especially close friendship with fellow French historian and frequent collaborator, Orest Ranum. In retirement, Bob remained an active scholar and teacher. He took delight in offering history classes to his neighbors at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville, MD, and he maintained close ties with his former students, who continued to seek his advice.
While he was an important scholar who helped to transform the field of French history beginning in the 1960s, those of us who were his students will remember his gentle good humor, his generous spirit, his intellectual curiosity and, above all, his joie de vivre. His former graduate student Lisa Jane Graham (Frank A Kafker Professor of history at Haverford) writes of him “he cared about every one of his students and nurtured us as individuals . . . Bob believed in me before I believed in myself and he never wavered in his support. I am eternally grateful to him. He modeled mentorship for me and I try to live up to his standard in my own career as a teacher and scholar.” His rigor as a professor, combined with kindness and profound decency, had an impact on all of his graduate students, and taught us what it meant to be historian and teachers. While we mourn his loss, Robert Forster’s was the epitome of a life well lived.
Christine Adams, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Jack R. Censer, George Mason University