In November 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter first opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor.
In March 1924, the French comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil wrote a short newspaper piece about the Egyptian pharaoh.
This piece is missing from Hervé Coutau-Bégarie’s generally comprehensive L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil, a book-length listing of Dumézil’s books, articles and other publications. (That book is out-of-print, but fairly easily available in libraries or second-hand.)
While Dumézil published a huge amount, by his standards he didn’t publish much in the first years of his career. His two doctoral theses were published in 1924, but before them very little. His first academic articles were in 1925, and his first book reviews in 1929. Coutau-Bégarie indicates three pieces in La Revue universelle about the École normale supérieure, published in 1920, but no other newspaper pieces until 1950.
The key absence from Coutau-Bégarie’s listing is the journalism which Dumézil published under the pseudonym ‘Georges Marcenay’ in the 1930s. Didier Eribon revealed this identity in his Faut-il brûler Dumézil? in 1992. Eribon identified many pieces signed by ‘Marceney’, particularly his regular columns on foreign politics for Le Jour. This was the French newspaper edited by Léon Bailby, though it shared a name with the Quebec independence newspaper and Belgian and Lebanese papers. The French Le Jour was politically on the right, pro-Mussolini but anti-Nazi, and Marcenay’s columns broadly took the same position. Eribon quoted from Marcenay’s columns extensively, and discussed them in some detail. But he expressed a hope others would develop this analysis:
For the rest, we can only hope that a researcher will undertake a systematic study of these chronicles, which often express more than just a simple judgement on current political events: they reveal what might be called Georges Dumézil’s ‘philosophy of history’. However, one must be cautious with this kind of expression: it would be rather risky to deduce that this ‘philosophy of history’ also inspires his academic research. What is certain, on the other hand, is that it shapes his vision of politics (p. 127).
Unfortunately, most commentators since have been content to depend upon Eribon’s work, rather than return to the sources themselves. In the research I’ve been doing on Dumézil I went through all the pieces I could find published by ‘Marcenay’. I found more pieces, both in the journals he was known to have written for, and some other outlets. At least some of his columns were reprinted in other places. I will discuss this elsewhere, though I also recognise that much more could be done.
There are also a few pieces in newspapers signed by Dumézil in his own name. Two were published in L’Intransigeant in March and April 1924, another right-wing paper, directed by Bailby before he founded Le Jour. Another article, and the earliest I have found after the ones for La Revue universelle, is this piece on “La véritable histoire de Tout-Ankh-Amon”, the true story of Tutankhamun, published in La Revue française. Its 9 March 1924 date means it predates his defence of his doctoral theses, which took place on 5 April.
La Revue française was the name given to several French papers, not to be confused with La Nouvelle Revue française, published by Gallimard. This particular one was a right-wing newspaper founded in 1905, edited by Antoine Rédier, originally with the name La Revue française politique et littéraire. Later, Maurice Blanchot would write for it – I’ve written about his political journalism and reviews of Dumézil before in this series.
The Tutankhamun piece is perhaps more interesting for the fact Dumézil wrote it than for its specific content. It appeared a few days after his 26th birthday (4 March 1924). Dumézil says a little about the sponsorship of Carter’s excavations by his friend Lord Carnarvon, the media circus about the discoveries, and the clash with the Egyptian authorities. He spends most time on giving some of the background to Tutankhamun’s reign and early death. The photographs in the article are credited to the Queen of Belgium, who was one of the first visitors to the excavation site in early 1923. One thing which is interesting about the piece is that Dumézil is writing about a figure outside of the Indo-European tradition, and not in one other area in which he worked, the Caucasus.
In 1925 Dumézil moved to Turkey, where he taught until 1931, and from there to Uppsala, where he taught for two years as well as running French cultural events in the town. (This was the post he would recommend Foucault for two decades later, briefly mentioned in his tribute to Foucault which is reproduced here.) I’ve found no articles in French newspapers during Dumézil’s time outside France. It was on his return to Paris in 1933 that he began writing for newspapers again, now under the pseudonym of ‘Georges Marcenay’. It has been claimed that the purpose was to supplement his income as a temporary lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The journalism ends in 1935, when he gained a permanent post there. As indicated above, the politics of that journalism has been discussed by Eribon and others, and is something I’ll treat elsewhere. But this piece on Tutankhamun is an interesting early piece.
References
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonée, Paris: Economica, 1998.
Georges Dumézil, “La Véritable histoire de Tout-Ankh-Amon”, La Revue française 19 (10), 9 March 1924, 262-63.
Georges Dumézil, “Les Fourmis sous l’averse”, L’Intransigeant, 13 March 1924, 1.
Georges Dumézil, “Nous manquons de mots historiques”, L’Intransigeant, 25 April 1924, 1.
Didier Eribon, Faut-il brûler Dumézil? Mythologie, science et politique, Paris: Fayard, 1992.
This is the 90th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. The pieces are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
