Maurice Herzog, a French alpinist who was hailed as a hero in his country in 1950 when he and a fellow climber became the first men to conquer a peak of more than 26,000 feet, that of Annapurna I in the Himalayas, died on Thursday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by Christian Brincourt, a longtime friend and former climbing partner. In a tribute, President François Hollande of France said Mr. Herzog’s climb was “engraved enduringly in our collective memory.”
Before Mr. Herzog led a team up Annapurna in the spring of 1950, men had in fact climbed higher — close to 28,000 feet on Mount Everest and K-2, the two tallest mountains in the world. But those climbers had not reached the summits, and it would be three years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did so on Everest.
Mr. Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit of Annapurna — the world’s 10th-highest peak, at 26,545 feet — on June 3 in brutal conditions; Mr. Herzog suffered frostbite that cost him most of his fingers and toes.
His star rose higher after he wrote an account of the journey that became what some call the most popular mountaineering book ever written. Titled “Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8,000-Meter Peak,” the book is a harrowing tale of courage, camaraderie and nearly catastrophic struggle.
“The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly, where I am still having rather a difficult time,” he wrote in the introduction, a year after the journey. The book concluded with a famous inspirational line: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.”
The book is said to have sold more than 11 million copies by 2000; National Geographic Adventure magazine called it “the most influential mountaineering book of all time”; Sports Illustrated ranked it 77th in its list of the top 100 sports books ever written. In recent years, however, Mr. Herzog was accused of suppressing competing versions of the climb for his own self-aggrandizement.
In the 2000 book “True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna,” the alpinist and writer David Roberts depicted Mr. Herzog as something of a glory hog. By Mr. Roberts’s account, Mr. Herzog used his prominence to obscure the achievement of Mr. Lachenal, whose diary often conflicted with Mr. Herzog’s book, telling of infighting among the climbers. (Mr. Lachenal also lost digits in the climb.)
Mr. Herzog’s daughter, Felicité, wrote a book in which she portrayed her father as a megalomaniac who “rewrote history, betrayed and neglected his entourage without ever having the sense of hurting anyone because society judged him to be so good.”
But he remained admired in France. Last year he was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor.
Mr. Herzog was born on Jan. 15, 1919. He fought in the French resistance during the German occupation of France in World War II. After his famous climb, he served in several government posts, including as secretary of state for sports when Charles de Gaulle was prime minister and as mayor of the resort town of Chamonix in the French Alps. He was a member of the International Olympic Committee for 25 years and helped bring the 1992 winter games to Albertville, France.
He is survived by his daughter, from his first marriage, as well as his second wife, Elisabeth, and two sons, Mathias and Sébastien.
In 1953, Mr. Herzog wrote an essay for The New York Times in which he described the first time he went climbing in the Alps as a student, finding himself isolated, vulnerable, in peril — and thrilled.
“I believe what I felt that day closely resembles what we call happiness,” he wrote. “I also believe that if I felt such happiness in such rigorous circumstances it is because the planned, organized, predigested happiness that the modern world offers is not complete. It leaves certain sides of man’s nature unsatisfied.”
Maurice Herzog, 93, Dies; Led Historic Himalaya Climb
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Maurice Herzog, 93, Dies; Led Historic Himalaya Climb
