In Memoriam: Professor Victor Brombert

Victor Brombert, a renowned scholar of French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, died Nov. 26 at age 101. A professor of Romance languages and literatures and comparative literature from 1975 to 1999, Brombert taught a popular undergraduate course on modern European writers and chaired Princeton’s Council of the Humanities from 1989 to 1994. He published a dozen books of literary criticism, including The Pensive Citadel, a collection of essays released just before his 100th birthday. In recent years, Brombert shared with PAW his story of military service in World War II as one of the Ritchie Boys — refugees from Europe who were trained at Maryland’s Fort Ritchie and deployed to conduct interrogations, often on the front lines. 

Read more in PAW’s 2021 profile of Brombert.