Lionel Richard (born 1938) is a French poet, historian and a former professor for Cultural studies.
Richard is a former faculty member of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens. His essays are regularly published by French publishing houses and periodicals such as Le Magazine littéraire, Le Monde diplomatique and Encyclopædia Universalis.
Since 1971, Richard mainly works on various aspects of German history of the 20th century, dedicating himself mainly to National Socialist Germany and its effects on humanity and culture. Amongst other subjects he described the Daily Life in the Weimar Republic, created the Encyclopedia of Bauhaus and featured German expressionism. A series of his essays were translated into different languages and are now points of references in their field.
He was one of the hosts of Le Panorama, a radio show on cultural affairs presented by France Culture in 1968 to 1998. In 2010, Richard for the first time named Maximilian Scheer as the before unknown author of the 1936 publication Das deutsche Volk klagt an. In this book (in English: The German People's Indictment), Scheer and his collaborators presented the cruelty of the Nazi regime in its first three years of existence and outlined precisely its intention to go to war and to murder the Jews and other groups of German society. Richard presented his findings in Le Monde diplomatique, and thereafter he wrote a foreword for the reprint of the book in 2012.