ABSTRACT
Henri Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau in Landes, a département in south-western France, to a well-off professional family. He did not like to be reminded of his birth date, 16 June in 1901, ‘adjusting’ it to 1905 by taking advantage of a felicitous and complementary error by librarians cataloguing his English translations. He died on 29 June 1991 at the official age of 90 in Pau, the capital of Haut-Pyrenees, where he had lived in his mother’s ancestral home in the nearby historic walled town of Navarrenx. His mother was part Basque and a fervent Catholic whom Lefebvre paradoxically described as ‘almost Jansenist… puritan’ (1989a:247). The narrowness of his mother’s religious belief was an early element against which the young Lefebvre rebelled. By contrast, his father was a pragmatic rationalist whom Lefebvre described as sceptical and anticlerical, ‘Voltairean’ (1989a:242).
