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Maurice Allais, the only French citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics died Saturday afternoon at his home in St. Cloud. He was 99 ½ years. A tribute will be made on Monday or Tuesday by the government. He should be buried in the Invalides Saturday, October 16.

Born May 31, 1911 in Paris, the son of shopkeepers, whose father had disappeared early in captivity during the First World War, was raised by his mother in terms that admitted himself hard. A brilliant student in high school Lakanal Sceaux, then at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he is especially fascinated by history.

Travel to the U.S. in 1933

These are the teachers who guide on another track, to the Polytechnic, which he joined in 1931 and he released "Major" in 1933 before choosing the Corps des Mines.Student at the School of Mines from 1934 to 1936, he will also faithful throughout his life as a professor until his retirement in May 1981 and continuing to conduct research and give them during long years later.

In fact, there is no a priori predisposed Maurice Allais to turn to economics. His early work, instead, to guide the science of concrete and fundamental physics experiments on which he also published many books including the pendulum swings and the laws of gravity. Throughout his life he remained fascinated by the science, even though they are his economic theories that earned him to receive the supreme reward.

The story is that his meeting with the economy coincided with his first trip to the United States during the summer of 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression.He is shocked by the disastrous social consequences it causes and the fact that nobody really understands the origin. It is this ignorance that leads him to want to analyze it to try to disassemble the mechanism and prevent this crisis from happening again elsewhere in the world. The troubles of 1936 in France naturally comfortable in this process.

In France, it was in 1988 that the public discovers Maurice Allais, crowned Nobel Laureate in Economics, the only French, yet until now, to have won this award.Upon surrender of his sword academician in October 1993, he also recalled that two days have marked his life: "1943, year of publication of my first book, In Search of economic discipline, the 'pure economics, which decided in my entire career, and whose date is engraved on the heel of the guard of my sword, and 1988 when I received the Nobel Prize in Economics, who has dedicated my work and is called the letter "N" engraved on the hilt of my sword. "

Ironically, five years earlier, in 1983, another French, Gerard Debreu, who had studied economics Maurice Allais, had also obtained the Nobel Prize. However, a naturalized American, he has always been considered a Nobel overseas.

Maurice Allais was not always well understood, far from it."Many players consider him a champion of protectionism," which is "profoundly wrong decision," stressed at the same ceremony, the teacher and researcher Thierry de Montbrial. But it is true that by dint of wanting political union before the economic union, Maurice Allais had emerged as a staunch advocate of a European first pains to ensure its own economic security, which had passed for those who wanted to build a fortress around Europe.

"Liberal Socialist"

Author of over a hundred books, Maurice Allais, who had been the grand cross of the Legion of Honor this year was defined himself as a "liberal socialist".This, he explained that this position made him wish for example, to avoid destruction of agriculture and industry French, restoration of regional preferences in international trade since the wage gap became too important. Collaborating in numerous newspapers, beginning with Le Figaro, and he recalled last year in the magazine Marianne, a "rational protectionism between countries of very different levels of life is not only justified but absolutely necessary." The announcement of his death came as Nobel Academy on Monday to unveil the new name of the winner under the economy.