Alain Besançon (25 April 1932 – 9 July 2023) was a French historian.^[1] He specialised in intellectual history and Russian politics. From 1965 to 1992 he was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.^{[2]: 98 [1]} He was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques of the Institut de France in 1996.^[1]

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His book L'Image interdite, une histoire intellectuelle de l'iconoclasme (1994) was translated into English as The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm in 2000 and published by the University of Chicago Press.^[2][3]

Besançon died on 9 July 2023, at the age of 91.^[4]

• Le Tsarévitch immolé, 1967.
• Histoire et expérience du moi, 1971.
• Entretiens sur le Grand Siècle russe et ses prolongements (co-author), 1971.
• Éducation et société en Russie, 1974.
• L'Histoire psychanalytique, une anthologie, 1974.
• Être russe au XIXème siècle, 1974.
• Court traité de soviétologie à l'usage des autorités civiles, militaires et religieuses, 1976 (preface by Raymond Aron).
• Les Origines intellectuelles du léninisme, Calmann-Lévy, 1977.
• La Confusion des langues, 1978.
• Présent soviétique et passé russe, Livre de poche, Paris, 1980 (réédité : Hachette, Paris, 1986).
• Anatomie d'un spectre: l'économie politique du socialisme réel, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1981.
• Courrier Paris-Stanford (co-author), 1984.
• La Falsification du bien, Soloviev et Orwell, 1985.
• Une génération, Julliard, 1987.
• Vendredis, 1989.
• L'Image interdite, une histoire intellectuelle de l'iconoclasme, 1994.
• Trois tentations dans l'Église, 1996.
• Aux sources de l’iconoclasme moderne, 1998.
• Le Malheur du siècle : sur le communisme, le nazisme et l'unicité de la Shoah, Fayard, 1998, 166 p.
• Émile et les menteurs, 2008.
• Cinq Personnages en quête d'amour. Amour et religion, 2010.
• Sainte Russie, 2012.
• Le Protestantisme américain. De Calvin à Billy Graham, 2013.
• Problèmes religieux contemporains, 2015.