Volume 30, Number 19 · December 8, 1983
Raymond Aron (1905–1983)
By Stanley Hoffmann
Nobody dies a 'happy death,' to use the title of Albert Camus's early novel. But Raymond Aron's death, on October 17, 1983, was both merciful and beautifully appropriate. He had suffered a heart attack in April 1977. For a few hours after it, he was unable to speak and for several hours he was partially paralyzed. He recovered, but he felt that he had lost a little of his legendary facility with words, and he feared that his 'reprieve' might end in protracted illness and decline, as in the case of Sartre, his old petit camarade from the Ecole Normale. Instead, he died like another man who had played an enormous role in his life, de Gaulle: a second heart attack struck him down in an instant.
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