Морис Эрцог: покоритель Аннапурны и автор бестселлера

French mountaineer and politician

Maurice André Raymond Herzog (mɔʁis ɑ̃dʁe ʁemɔ̃ ɛʁzɔɡ; 15 January 191913 December 2012) was a French mountaineer and administrator who was born in Lyon, France. He led the 1950 French Annapurna expedition that first climbed a peak over 8000m, Annapurna, in 1950, and reached the summit with Louis Lachenal. Upon his return, he wrote a best selling book about the expedition, Annapurna.

On 3 June 1950, Herzog and Louis Lachenal became the first climbers in modern history to climb a peak over 8000m when, on the 1950 French Annapurna expedition, they summited the Himalayan mountain Annapurna I, the 10th highest mountain in the world. The event caused a huge sensation that was only matched when Everest was summited in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. The two week retreat from the peak proved very challenging. Both climbers had opted for light boots for the summit dash. This, combined with Herzog losing his gloves near the summit and a night spent bivouacked in a crevasse on the descent with one sleeping bag for four climbers (Lachenal, Gaston Rébuffat, Lionel Terray, and Herzog) resulted in severe frostbite, with consequent gangrene requiring the expedition doctor to perform emergency amputations in the field. Both summit climbers lost all of their toes and Herzog most of his fingers. Annapurna I was not climbed again until 1970, when the French north face route was climbed by a British Army expedition led by Colonel Henry Day, simultaneously with an ascent of the south face by an expedition led by British climber Chris Bonington. The mountain's fourth ascent was not until 1977.

Herzog's account of the expedition was published first in 1951 in French, then in English in 1952 under the title Annapurna. The book has sold over 11 million copies as of 2000, more than any other mountaineering title. Ending with the stirring line "there are other Annapurnas in the lives of men" (in the context of the book, an exhortation to answer the challenges that life offers), the book gave an account of the expedition that established Herzog's climbing reputation and inspired a generation of mountaineers.

Some aspects of Herzog's account of the summit day have been called into question with the publication of other members’ accounts of the expedition, most significantly by a biography of Gaston Rébuffat and the posthumous publication, in 1996, of Lachenal's contemporaneous journals. The 2000 book True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna by David Roberts gives one view of the controversy. Herzog was a 1944 graduate of the French business school HEC Paris.