In previous updates on this project, I have talked a bit about how in the chapter I’m currently writing I am trying to situate Dumézil’s books from the mid-1930s and 1940s in relation to his politics and his teaching. I’ve made some progress continuing that work. This is no small task, as he published a lot in this period, sometimes seeming like he just wrote up that year’s lecture notes as a book, and moved onto the next. There is repetition, endless self-correction and clarification. He works on two book series in parallel – Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus has four volumes, and Les Mythes Romains three – but the first at least had another planned. There is another book written as an introduction to both series published after them. Some of these books appear in revised editions or the material is recycled for another book later, sometimes much later in his career. Translations are used as an opportunity to update too, so they don’t always exactly match the French. (I say how the Italian Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus adapts material, for example, here.) I’d read nearly all of these books while working on the Mitra-Varuna introduction, but this is the first time working through them in chronological sequence and trying to write about all of them. 

I plan to have one chapter on the early part of Dumézil’s career, and another from 1938 until 1949. 1938 is the ‘year zero’ for his trifunctional hypothesis, and he positions that as the crucial moment in his work. 1949 is the year he was elected to the Collège de France. The idea is that 1949 was the moment when the story of Benveniste and Dumézil becomes fully entwined, and they then teach in parallel for twenty years until Benveniste’s incapacitating stroke. 

I had thought that my chapter on Dumézil up to 1938 was in fairly good shape, and hadn’t looked at the draft much since last year. But the last part was far less developed than I thought, and needed some serious work, especially in terms of the treatment of Ouranós-Váruna and Flamen-Brahman. Those books pre-date the trifunctional hypothesis, but anticipate it in some ways. They share similar approaches to his earliest works, but are closer to the style of the later ones. I’m treating them as transitional texts, and their discussion could probably work in either the 1924-37 chapter or the later Dumézil one. I’m happier with the early chapter now, but there are bits still unfinished or which I’m not sure fit. There are discussions of Dumézil’s teacher Marcel Granet and his student and language teacher Marie-Louise Sjœstedt – on whom I’ve written a little here – but I’m not sure how much I can say about all the important teachers of Dumézil, and Benveniste. Antoine Meillet deserves systematic treatment, for example. The poor state of the draft chapter was partly a result of the months I had off work last year, as I think when I returned from illness I was impatient to get onto something new. It’s in better shape now.

In looking for an essay by Sartre, published in his Situations, I realised the chaotic nature of the organisation of these books and their translations. The essay I was interested in, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” is in Situations III in the first edition and Situations II in the second. It is translated in The Aftermath of War, but there is also a volume with the same press called Post-War Reflections, in which this essay, but not all the others, is included. I say a bit more about this problem, and the challenge of editing and translating collections of essays, here, but the fuller bibliographic work is here. I also finally did the comparison between Foucault’s two texts on Georges Canguilhem, and the results of that are here. I hope someone finds these, or the other research resources on this site, helpful.

I recently made a short trip to Switzerland to begin the archival work in that country. I stayed in Geneva, and I had a couple of very interesting and productive days at the Bibliothèque de Genève. I had ordered quite a lot of things, including letters between Benveniste and Charles Bally of the Société Genevoise de Linguistique, and François Esseiva, the librarian who employed and housed Benveniste in Fribourg during the war. One letter from Benveniste’s friend Jean de Menasce to the Société, asking for support for Benveniste, has been published by Alessandro Chidichimo, but I wanted to see the original. I also looked at papers of the Société Genevoise de Linguistique in the Bally collection, although surprisingly Benveniste does not seem to have become a member or even spoken there. He did contribute to the Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure which the Société founded, although much later – he published the letters from Saussure to Antoine Meillet, with an introduction. (The originals of these are in Geneva, deposited there by Benveniste, and can be downloaded here.)

I also looked at the Georges Redard papers, which mainly relate to Ferdinand de Saussure. The main Redard archive is in Berne, which I still hope to visit, but these papers are ones which make sense to have in Geneva where most of Saussure’s own papers are kept. Lots of Redard’s notes and materials relating to Benveniste are at the Collège de France, and they have been very useful. I think the Collège de France also has Redard’s notes from some Benveniste lectures he attended, though I haven’t looked at those yet. As well as texts and notes by Redard, the Geneva materials include some things he collected relating to Saussure – photocopies of manuscripts, including some of the Harvard collection, some original correspondence and a set of notes from a Saussure course on Lithuanian, beautifully presented across four notebooks. These must have been written up after the event – I’ve never seen such neat student notes. There were also some copies of articles about Saussure, some of which really seem worth a closer look. I did ask to see a few other things, since I was here, but there was nothing especially useful beyond the Benveniste letters and Redard’s papers. 

I then went to Fribourg for a day, a trip I’d initially planned to the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, but I also went to the Archives de l’état de Fribourg. The archivist at the BCUF told me about this other collection, and fortunately this was in advance of my visit so I could combine the trips. Some of this material is photocopied and in the Collège de France archives – I think deposited there by Redard. But it was good to see the original material. At the BCUF I was able to look at some material relating to Benveniste’s time there, in a couple of unexpected places advised by the archivist. One in particular gave a new insight into a story I had reluctantly conceded might not be true. But I am now convinced it is, and this source also helped to indicate how it is. Provided with some local geographical knowledge from Juliet Fall, I then went on a short trip to a place near where Benveniste crossed the border into the country in 1943. It was interesting to see a place so many did cross – now entirely open and barely marked. Juliet and some of her colleagues also helped identify the places Benveniste was interned in Switzerland before being released to Fribourg. As I said in the Foucault work, the story I’m trying to reconstruct has a geography as well as a history.

I will hopefully get back to Switzerland to do some work in Berne, but I think I have done the main work in Fribourg and Geneva. As I was in Geneva, I took a detour back to the hotel one evening to look at the plaque commemorating Ferdinand de Saussure on the side of the house owned by his family. Unfortunately the lecture room in which he gave his famous course in general linguistics is in a building undergoing renovation, as it would have been nice to see that too. And since I was in Fribourg, I did walk by the house Benveniste stayed while in exile in the town.

I spoke briefly about Benveniste’s time in the Second World War at a department conference this week, but there is a lot I’ve discovered and it’s a good story to tell – one which I definitely didn’t exhaust in a very short talk. I contacted a few more archives and one was able to digitise their files relating to Benveniste, which shed some more light on the story. I’m waiting on another to report back on the extent of the papers they have. But there are some letters in Copenhagen which will require a visit there. I’ll be in Paris in early July, continuing work on the Benveniste papers at the Bibliothèque nationale. 

Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is now scheduled for December 2024. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career. My article “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” is due out in the next issue of Journal of the History of Ideas.