These past hundred years have changed how we perceive differences and have revolutionized how we think of relationships between cultures. Friday November 28 was Claude Lévi Strauss’s 100th birthday. The Fondation Chirac and its President salute the man who first engaged in the battles they have since taken on: saving languages and cultures threatened with extinction.

Jacques Chirac took this opportunity to thank Claude Lévi-Strauss for his life’s work that “occupies a place that is as unique as it is important in the imagination and the hearts of all humanists.” Furthermore, “from one book to the next, you allow us to understand the diversity and richness of cultures, their grandeurs and weaknesses, gathering together and transmitting a precious testimony of our century. Your work constitutes a conceptual base for anthropology, rendering intelligible many contemporary questions”, Jacques Chirac told him.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, side by side with Jacques Chirac, supported the creation of the museum at Quai Branly. Today the Fondation is examining once again the anthropologist’s 2005 assessment of the world: “the current ravages [namely] the frightening disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals, and, by the very fact of its density, the human species is living under a sort of self-poisoning system if I may say so – and I think of the present and of the world in which I am finishing my days. It is not a world I enjoy.” [5]. The Fondation Chirac pays tribute to this visionary who inspires it.

[5] France 2, a special for the 100th show of Campus, Thursday February 17, 2005, editor: Laurent Lemire.