Christian Delacroix, a French historian originally from a working class family, started his leftwing political activism when he was very young and was strongly marked by the events of May 1968. He graduated in philosophy in the Sorbonne, moving to the area of history when he was approved for the Saint-Cloud École Normale Supérieure. In 1977 he passed the Agrégation exam, afterwards working for more than 20 years as a secondary school teacher. In 2000 he applied for a position in the IUFM (Teacher Training Institute) in Créteil. Together with his colleagues François Dosse and Patrick Garcia he joined the Institute of the History of the Present Time (IHTP), where he participated in several seminars concerned with the epistemology of studies about the present time. He has published numerous works in the field of theory and historiography.