Élisabeth de Fontenay

Élisabeth (nickname, "Isabelle") Bourdeau de Fontenay is the daughter of Henri Bourdeau de Fontenay, from a right-wing Catholic family, a lawyer who supported the Front Populaire and an early Resistance fighter, and Nessia Hornstein, a dentist of Jewish origin but converted to Catholicism, whose family had fled Odessa during the Odessa pogroms of 1905. A large part of Nessia's family was exterminated at Auschwitz.^[2]

Élisabeth was raised Catholic, baptized as a child, then enrolled at the age of five at the Collège Sainte-Marie in Neuilly-sur-Seine. At the age of 22, she abandoned Catholicism and turned to Judaism; she details her conversion in the book Actes de naissance (Birth certificates), published in 2011.^[1][3][4]

Fontenay is an Emeritus Senior lecturer in philosophy at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.^[5] She had an early interest in Karl Marx, to whom she dedicated a work entitled Les figures juives de Marx: Marx dans l'idéologie allemande (Jewish figures in Marx: Marx in German ideology) (1973). In 1981, she published a landmark book on the materialism of Denis Diderot, Diderot ou le Matérialisme enchanté (Diderot or Enchanted Materialism). She was a member of the board of directors of the journal Les Temps modernes (Modern times), a position she relinquished in January 1983.^[6]

Among the authors who have influenced Fontenay's work are Vladimir Jankélévitch, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.^[7] After Jankélévitch's death in 1985, Fontenay founded the Association Vladimir Jankélévitch with Pierre Michel Klein and Béatrice Berlowitz.^[8]

Like her later works, this contribution examines the relationship between humans and animals in history. This reflection culminated in her magnum opus Le silence des bêtes (The silence of the beasts), published by Fayard in 1998. This work once again raises the question of what is "proper to man",^[9] and challenges the idea of a fixed difference between man and animal.^[9] Focusing on the long term, Fontenay examines conceptions of the animal from the Pre-Socratic philosophy to the present day, via René Descartes and his animal machine hypothesis.^[10] Between 2007 and 2010, Fontenay chaired the "Commission Enseignement de la Shoah" (Shoah Education Commission) of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.^[11] Drawing on her position as President of the Commission, Fontenay, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, does not hesitate to draw a parallel between Nazi genocidal methods and the agri-food industry in the preface to Le silence des bêtes.

She was a signatory of La Paix maintenant (Peace Now).^[12] She is also a member of the Comité consultatif national d'éthique,^[13] alongside Henri Atlan. Concerned by the ethical issues surrounding the treatment of animals, she and Donald M. Broom published Le bien-être animal (Animal welfare) (Éditions du Conseil de l'Europe, "Regard éthique", 2006), which sets out the ethical issues raised by this subject, examining religious viewpoints and the positions of different countries.

From September 2010, Fontenay presented, with Fabienne Chauvière, a program dedicated to animals on France Inter: Vivre avec les bêtes (Living with the beasts).^[14] From the following season, she teamed up with Allain Bougrain-Dubourg to host the show,^[15] which ended in June 2014.

In 2018, she prefaced the book Le Nouvel Antisémitisme en France, a collective of texts by Luc Ferry, Pascal Bruckner, Philippe Val, Boualem Sansal, Éric Marty, Georges Bensoussan, Jean-Pierre Winter, Daniel Sibony, Barbara Lefebvre [fr], Monette Vacquin, Michel Gad Wolkowicz, Noémie Halioua, Jacques Tarnero, Caroline Valentin, and Lina Murr Nehmé.^[16]