Eminent cultural historian whose work touched on literature, philosophy and music
Jacques Barzun, who has died aged 104, was a scholar of encyclopedic knowledge allied to a determination to maintain high standards in any of the fields his work touched on: literature, philosophy, history and music were usually present. Born in France, for more than four decades he was based at Columbia University, New York, mainly in the history department, where he was also a dedicated teacher.
His many articles and books – starting in 1932 and continuing for the rest of the century – sought to help students, researchers and writers. He saw nothing odd or improper in dealing with the most exalted subjects and then turning to the more ordinary task of telling students to avoid jargon and cliches, and advising them about quotations and footnotes. He always wrote clearly and carefully; he was learned and erudite, but never intimidating and often amusing, with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes.
One of the fullest expositions of his ideas, in more than 800 pages, came in From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000). In a tone that is often conversational, and with a narrative that is frequently interrupted to give biographies of particular people, he analyses European history from the Reformation to the closing years of the 20th century. There are key themes that give continuity: emancipation, primitivism, self-consciousness, individualism, abstraction, secularism and scientism. In his explanation of cultural decline, Barzun links political egalitarianism and cultural egalitarianism.
The best-known publication of his middle years was his monumental two-volume Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950, revised 1969). Other writers on Berlioz still quote Barzun, for example on the marriage to the unfortunate Harriet Smithson, where he explains that Berlioz was "so constituted that his tenacity would not let him yield anything on which he had once set his heart".
Barzun maintained his interest in the composer as further letters from him were discovered, using one of them in his book aimed at students and writers, The Modern Researcher (1957, written with Henry Graff, now in its sixth edition). Berlioz, giving a Paris address, wrote to an unknown person, promising to send him a new work of his, dating the letter Thursday 23 June. It was easy to consult the calendar, knowing that Berlioz lived at that address in the 1850s, and to find that Thursday 23 June occurred in 1853. But Barzun could not find any publication for 1853, though there had been one in 1852. Furthermore, he found that in June 1853 Berlioz had been in London. From all this there was only one conclusion to be drawn – that the letter must have been written on 23 June 1852, and Berlioz must have been mistaken in thinking that the day was Thursday. Barzun subsequently found other occasions when Berlioz had made a mistake concerning the day of the week. The whole served as a lesson to those who were starting to do research.
Barzun had absorbed American culture very successfully and was always glad to show this in his writings. But he was also ready to make fun of Americans, as in The House of Intellect (1959), where almost all the sources are American, and the topics discussed are placed in an essentially American framework. For example, Barzun describes the starting point of conversation as contradiction: but democratic manners, that is to say American, will not tolerate this. Conversation is therefore confined to the statement of facts or to the exchange of bland opinions. Politics and religion are excluded from conversation.
Barzun was born in Créteil, south-eastern Paris, the son of Henri Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun. Jacques started his education at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and remembered how his parents were visited by some of the leading artistic figures of the time, among them the writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Marie Laurencin.
To escape the chaos of France after the first world war, in 1920 Jacques emigrated to the US with his mother. He went to Columbia as an undergraduate, and while a postgraduate student there assisted Carlton Hayes on his book A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe. From this, he grasped the principle of linking subject areas to present the fuller picture made possible by the emerging discipline of cultural history.
In 1932 Barzun was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu. From that came his first book, The French Race, which he later revised as Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937). Four years later, he produced Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, putting these three figures in the intellectual climate of their times and considering their work in relation to prevailing social assumptions.
When asked how long it had taken him to write From Dawn to Decadence, Barzun replied: "A lifetime." In 1975 he retired from Columbia as professor emeritus, having served as professor, dean and provost during the previous 30 years, and became literary adviser to the publishers Scribner's. He was a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and an extraordinary fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
His first marriage, to Lucretia Mueller, ended in divorce in 1936. That year he married Mariana Lowell, who died in 1979. The following year, he married Marguerite Davenport. She survives him, as do his children, James, Roger and Isabel, from his second marriage.
• Jacques Barzun, cultural historian and educator, born 30 November 1907; died 25 October 2012
• Douglas Johnson died in 2005