Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, on January 6, 1912, into a poor family of mixed origins: his father was born in Malta, of Italian and Serbian descent, and his mother was Franco-Portuguese. At nineteen, he read Marx’s Das Kapital and even drew close to the Communist Party, searching for answers to human suffering.
In 1932, reading chapter 8 of the letter to the Romans, he underwent a conversion he described as brutal and sudden. He said that there the Bible gave him something that Marx’s explanations of society could not. He became a lay member of the Reformed Church of France.
He graduated in Law from the University of Bordeaux and earned his doctorate in 1936. He taught at the faculties of Montpellier, Strasbourg, and Clermont-Ferrand. He married Yvette in 1937, and they had four children. In 1940, a law of the Vichy government removed from public service teachers whose father was not French by birth, and Ellul fell under it because his father had been born in Malta. He lost his chair and withdrew to a rural property in Martres.
There, during the Nazi occupation, he helped Jews and other persecuted people escape, with forged documents and passage to safer zones, as part of an underground network linked to local Protestants. Decades later, in 2001, the Yad Vashem institute recognized him, along with fellow members of that network, as Righteous Among the Nations.
At the Liberation, in 1944, he even served for a few months as deputy mayor of Bordeaux, but he grew disillusioned with the real limits of political power and abandoned that path for good, devoting himself to teaching and writing. He taught History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux until his retirement in 1980. He wrote more than fifty books and hundreds of articles, many of them devoted to showing how modern technique shapes man more than man shapes it.
His work ran on two tracks that he deliberately kept separate: a sociological analysis, harsh and at times bleak, of technique and propaganda, and a theological reflection oriented toward hope and freedom in Christ. Critics such as Christopher Lasch accused him of technological determinism and of a hopeless pessimism, a reading Ellul himself considered incomplete, since his theological writings pointed toward engagement and hope.
He also became involved in concrete causes: he chaired a juvenile delinquency prevention club for nearly twenty years and, between 1977 and 1979, chaired the committee defending the Aquitaine coast against real estate speculation. He died in Pessac, near Bordeaux, on May 19, 1994, three years after the death of his wife, Yvette.
His warning about technique becoming an end in itself continues to challenge Christians who live and serve in a world increasingly shaped by automated and efficient systems, reminding them that human freedom endures only when it is consciously chosen and lived.
