Raymond D. D. Giraud
1920-June 17, 2006
Palo Alto, California

Raymond D. Giraud, 85, a longtime resident of Palo Alto, died June 17 after a long illness.

A Stanford Emeritus Professor of French literature and a human- and animal-rights activist, he was born in New York City in 1920 and was the eldest of five children. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1941 and also served in the United States Army in WWII, where his fluency in French was particularly helpful to the war effort. In 1948, he married his wife, Lise, an Austrian refugee.

A year later he received a master's degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from Yale University in 1954. An expert in 19th century French literature, he was bestowed numerous academic honors over the course of his life. He published The Unheroic Hero in the Novels of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert in 1957, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1961, and in 1967 was decorated by the French Acadamie as a Chevalier, Ordre des Palmes Academique.

After several years as an instructor at Yale, he joined the Stanford University faculty in the Department of French and Italian in 1958. There he was appointed professor in 1962 and remained in that position until he accepted emeritus status in 1986. Meanwhile, his wife, Lise, had become a principal librarian for the university.

Starting in the early 1960s, the couple became vocal critics of U.S. government policies in Vietnam and elsewhere. They actively supported various student protest movements at Stanford during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the nascent union movement there.

In later years, they both worked for human rights in other countries. Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000, they traveled to Haiti on several occasions to witness elections and otherwise support the democratic movements there. Their home in Palo Alto was often a gathering place for events marking various human-rights activities. They also devoted much of their time to animal-rights initiatives, picketing circuses and rodeos in protest of cruel treatment toward animals.

Raymond served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Palo Alto Humane Society and co-director of education for the In Defense of Animals organization. In 1999, he and his wife were given the Humanitarians of the Year Award by the Marin Humane Society.

He is survived by his wife, Lise Giraud of Palo Alto.

Tags: teacher/educator