I am an American only by mutual choice. Before I was an American I was happily English; my values and much of my culture comes from the games I played, and being a British soldier during the Second World War.
Before I became English, I had been Romanian. It was by chance that most of my work was subsequently undertaken, that I wrote on this and not on that. Fortuitous, contingency, and sheer good luck (not blind), because it followed orientation, preparation, determination, and hard work, but still serendipitous.
I spent the middle 1960s as chairman of the Department of History at UCLA, having little or no opportunity for research as a result of my management workload. So I wrote a textbook, Men Cultures and Societies from the Renaissance to the Present. The book tried to offer a new synthesis but called for little research. I have been teaching courses on Western civilization and Western tradition since 1952 and wanted a text that married politics and society with cultural life in the broadest sense. I wrote that book for the common people, those are the readers who I have always wanted to touch.
In 1968, I moved to the University of Bordeaux to spend two years as director of UCLA’s French Center for Education Abroad. That was a revelation. I saw a different France. I have read about France all my life and specialized in its history since 1950 yet all I really knew of France was Paris. France was Paris. Of course, I had seen many parts of the country as a tourist but never had I experienced life outside Paris. So there I was in the middle of a distant France with a very different France to explore. And I took the time to write Peasant Into Frenchmen.
Eugen Joseph Weber was born in Bucharest in Romania in April 24, 1925. He attended high school in England as a boarding student. His father was a prominent industrialist in Romania with a university degree from Germany. His mother completed high school in Switzerland.
In high school, he tell us that he was performing very badly in both mathematics and science, but had a lively imagination that he fed with great literature.
After graduating from high school, Weber felt a deep desire to join the British Royal Army. Something that he subsequently did. This was 1943 at the eve of the Second World War.
Weber fought in the Second World War achieving the high status of Captain. After the war he felt that his interests in the army has waned, and he wanted to release himself from the Army.
After ending his Army career he was determined to enter the world of academia. He remarks that all his life since age five he has had and insatiable deep desire for reading, and now he wanted to do it formally. He grew up reading Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas of the Three Musketeers fame, William Shakespeare’s plays and other authors of note.
Initially he attended Institut d’études politiques in Paris, France. This was where she met his wife, Jacqueline Brument-Roth. They were married in 1950.
By 1950 he started at Cambridge University where he would remain and completing a a four year Bachelor of Arts degree, that was followed by Master of Arts in History. After some conflicts with Cambridge University regarding his PhD degree, it was withdrawn, being awarded only M.Litt.
While at Cambridge his professor notified him about a lecture position in Nigeria, West Africa at the University of Ibadan. This was in the 1956 when Nigeria was still frimly part of Britain and has not corrupted itself as it is now. Eugen Weber felt tempted to take the position but as nature rules he found himself in North America, not Africa.
He was to spent one year lecturing at the University of Alberta in Canada, from 1954 to 1955. From there he transitioned to the University of Iowa where he would settle until he got appointed at the University of California at Los Angeles where he would remain the rest of his life building UCLA to where is it now, a a behemoth of great stature. After his retirement, he continued his association with the University.
