A major figure in French-speaking geography passed away on Monday March 23 in the person of Jean-Bernard Racine, honorary professor at the University of Lausanne. He was 85 years old. Appointed professor as soon as he completed his thesis, at the age of 25, first in Canada then for thirty years at the Unil Institute of Geography, Jean-Bernard Racine had a remarkable career [1]crowned by the Vautrin-Lud Prize, the “Nobel of geography”, which is enough to place him in his rightful place in the discipline, namely at the top.
Jean-Bernard Racine was a quintessential geographer. An atavistic reader, endowed with an immense bookish culture, an immoderate love for the lexicon, a compulsive and prolific editor, he had a keen eye for territories and space: geographical eye. Of an easy and engaging character, with a Mediterranean kindness, he was aware of the place he occupied, devoid of both false modesty and the slightest particle of pride. As boss and teacher, he was brilliant, direct but never authoritarian, speaking to everyone from the first hour course – a legacy of May 1968. But above all, Jean-Bernard Racine was eternally curious, never jaded, always enthusiastic, easily amazed, all qualities almost childish in him, who often rewarded those around him with memorable moments, an intellectual freshness which allowed him to identify and to embrace trends and fashions, sometimes to the point of excess.
Intellectual curiosity
But it is this extraordinary intellectual curiosity that allowed him to go through half a century of evolution of a protean discipline, constantly reinventing itself, without ever losing contact with the latest developments. One example among others: landing in Lausanne, he brought with him the quantitative revolution born across the Atlantic, i.e. the exploitation of statistical methods applied to the territory: in doing so, he largely contributed to launching the “new geography” in the French-speaking world. He could have stayed there, installed at the pinnacle of his profession, but that would have been unnatural. He almost immediately explored other paths, other paths, in cultural and social geography, as the branch transformed. His insatiable curiosity prevailed over all other considerations. It was she who defined it.
And it was she who made a synthesis, all by himself, of all the fields of human geography: literate and analytical, cultural and statistical, religious and scientific, “verbo-conceptual and logical-formal, as he would have formulated it, with equal happiness.
Forever curious, always amazed.
[1] We will read the beautiful tribute paid by Céline Rozenblat on the website of the Faculty of Geosciences and the Environment of Unil.
