Franklin L. Ford served as a major participant in this Faculty’s business throughout his career, as Assistant and Associate Professor, Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Lowell House, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History, and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from fall l962 through spring 1970. He was born in Waukegan, Illinois on December 26, 1920, and attended the University of Minnesota, where his uncle Guy Stanton Ford, a leading historian of Germany, served as president and presumably had an impact on his nephew’s vocational choice. Graduating in 1942, Ford enrolled for a semester of graduate study at Cornell, then entered the army and after receiving a commission, joined the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS. There he served with a galaxy of young historians, some recruited by Professor William Langer, who had studied or would regroup at Harvard, including John Clive, H. Stuart Hughes, and Carl Schorske. He returned to Harvard to take his M.A. in 1948 and Ph.D. in 1950 in early modern French history. His dissertation became a distinguished contribution to the history of the Ancien Régime, Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV, published by Harvard University Press in 1953. Ford was well aware that he was venturing into one of the densest historiographical thickets of the West, but intrepidly analyzed the ambiguous role of the eighteenth century French nobility, which, “if it did not have the strength to suppress revolution, had at least recovered enough strength to make revolution inevitable.”

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