Jacques Ellul

His paternal grandfather was Italian but had come from Malta; his paternal grandmother was Serbian, a descendant of the Obrenović family. His father had studied in Vienna and carried both Austrian and British citizenship. His mother was the daughter of a French woman and a Portuguese man named Mendès. The family’s convergence in Bordeaux came when his father took a post as representative for the wine merchant Louis Eschenauer, though unemployment would visit the household more than once, owing to his father’s uncompromising streak. Ellul later said he was born there by chance but stayed by choice.

His schooling was excellent. At the Lycée Montesquieu, now the Lycée Longchamp, he was consistently at the top of his class, and by seventeen he’d finished his baccalauréat at the Lycée Montaigne, already strong in Latin, German, French, and history. His ambition was the navy. His father overruled him and sent him to study law instead.

Two things happened at the University of Bordeaux that determined the shape of everything that followed. First, on 10 August 1930, God appeared to him in a vision he spent the rest of his life declining to describe in any detail. He didn’t dramatise it; he simply held it, and his theology spent six decades trying to work out what it asked of him. Second, he met Bernard Charbonneau, a fellow writer from Aquitaine with whom he developed what historians now call a Gascon variant of personalism. The social philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier was their starting point, but they pushed it toward something more anarchist and ecologically minded than Mounier ever intended. Ellul wanted Mounier’s journal Esprit to speak for a genuinely revolutionary movement, one rooted in regions and self-governing groups rather than Parisian intellectual life. He eventually broke with Mounier, and what drove the break was what he saw as the latter’s rigid Catholicism. His third decisive encounter came when he met Yvette Lensvelt, whom he married in 1937; together they had four children: Jean, Simon, Yves, and Dominique.

He completed his doctorate in 1936 with a thesis on the legal history of the mancipium, then taught at the faculties of law in Montpellier in 1937 and 1938, and at Strasbourg in 1938 and 1940. The Vichy government cut that career short: his father’s foreign citizenship was grounds enough to dismiss him in 1940. He took his family to the village of Martres, in the Entre-deux-mers between the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, where he farmed and joined the Resistance. He was proud of his first ton of potatoes, he later said, no less than he was of passing his agrégation in Roman law in 1943. After the Liberation, he served briefly in the Bordeaux city administration from 31 October 1944 to 29 April 1945, then withdrew from electoral politics for good. For his wartime efforts to protect Jewish lives, Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations in 2001. From 1946 until his retirement in 1980, he taught the history of law and social history at the University of Bordeaux and its affiliated Institute of Political Studies, rarely leaving the southwest.

The concept at the centre of his intellectual project is technique. He defined it in La Technique: ou, l’enjeu du siècle (1954), published in English as The Technological Society in 1964, as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Machines aren’t the problem. The problem is the underlying logic, the imperative toward maximum efficiency that colonises medicine, education, politics, and religion just as thoroughly as it colonises industry. Technique doesn’t ask what things are for. It asks only how to do them faster and with less waste. And what Ellul found alarming wasn’t just this logic’s reach; it was its invisibility. A society that has lived inside it long enough begins to mistake it for nature.

Propagandes (1962; English: Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes) carried the argument into the territory of mass belief. Most mid-century thinkers treated propaganda as something authoritarian regimes did. Ellul’s claim was harder to shake: modern democracies ran on it too, and the mass media’s constant stimulation of opinion was structurally propagandistic regardless of content. L’Illusion politique (1964; The Political Illusion) went further still, arguing that electoral politics had become theatre, a way of making citizens feel powerful while technique and bureaucracy made the decisions that mattered. These three books belong together, and Ellul was candid about what he was constructing. He told Le Monde in 1981 that he was describing “a world with ‘no exit,’ convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.”

That last clause is the key to the theological writing running alongside the sociology. He wasn’t preaching hopelessness. Naming the trap was itself a form of freedom, he believed, and Christian faith was the only vantage point genuinely outside the system. His first book, Le Fondement théologique du droit (1946), made the case that any coherent account of law needed theological grounding. Présence au monde moderne (1948), translated as Presence in the Modern World, called Christians neither to retreat from the world nor to be absorbed by it, but to maintain a kind of attentive resistance. Later texts on the Bible, hope, and apocalypse continued this strand. A layman in the Reformed Church of France, he served on its National Council but remained a gadfly throughout, far more interested in the prophetic tradition than in institutional management.

His Islam and Judeo-Christianity took seriously the structural differences between Islamic and Christian conceptions of revelation and law, refusing to smooth them into easy agreement. This is worth pausing over. Ellul spent his career warning against systems that make everything look the same by flattening what doesn’t fit. His comparative theology operated by the same refusal. Each tradition carries an archive of hard-won wisdom about what makes human life worth living, and those archives don’t require harmonising to be respected. The impulse behind his critique of technique and the impulse behind his cross-traditional seriousness were, finally, the same one: see clearly, without the distortions that come from needing a particular answer.

His influence spread widely, if unevenly. William Stringfellow, the American theologian and lawyer, drew directly on his work, as did a generation of thinkers writing at the intersection of Christian ethics and environmental politics. The International Jacques Ellul Society, founded in 2000 by former students, now brings together scholars from sociology, theology, media studies, and political philosophy. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Charbonneau, his oldest intellectual companion, outlived him and kept developing the ecological personalism they’d sketched together in the 1930s, though his work reached fewer readers outside France.

Ellul spent his final years at his house in Pessac, a few kilometres from the university where he’d taught for more than three decades. He died there on 19 May 1994, surrounded by family. He was eighty-two. According to those close to him, what his doctors couldn’t do for him near the end struck him as a final, personal confirmation of the thesis he’d never stopped arguing: that the ambivalence of technological progress wasn’t an abstraction. It had been true of everything, all along.