French culture treats intellectuals as celebrities. The equivalent of movie starts in the U.S., they are constantly celebrated for their “grandeur” — a concept that combines intellectual achievement with glory. His seminal works included 1960 Sociologie de L’Algerie (in America, published as The Algerians), which provided a context for the bloodiest revolution in history (in Algeria, against French rule), and he took the side of striking railroad workers in 1995. Throughout his life he was one of the biggest names in French academia, and a fearless supporter of the oppressed.

On this day, August, in 1930, Pierre Bourdieu was born in a remote mountain village in southwestern France. His father was a sharecropper, and then a postman. Bourdieu grew up with a hunger for knowledge and taste for poverty and oppression, particularly after military service brought him to Algiers.

Bourdieu took a post as a lecturer in Algiers in 1958 and use social and economic studies to explain the Algerian revolt, saying the wage-labor system brought in by the French violently uprooted traditional society. In 2002, he used the same method to examine his own family’s life and the decline of the French peasant class in general.