Raymond Aron was born in 1905 into a middle-class Jewish family in Paris and Versailles. His father's branch had roots in Lorraine, a pledge of ardent patriotism at the time. His grandfather had founded a wholesale textile business in a village in the Vosges. His maternal grandfather owned a small textile mill in the North. The thinker's father had intellectual ambitions of his own and chose not to enter the family business. He undertook brilliant studies, missed the agrégation in law and contented himself with very honourable teaching positions, but below his ambitions. Gustave Aron then stopped working, but the crash of 1929 soon ruined him: the imprudent man had invested an excessive part of the family patrimony, partly from his wife's dowry, on the stock market.
Raymond Aron will always want to avenge his humiliated father
The strength of the father figure can be gauged by Aron's confession in his Memoirs: "He remained the father and I hardly asked him any questions." Feeling guilty...
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