Very expensive hardback and e-book only at the moment.
In the 1930s, activists with France’s Popular Front mobilized culture against fascism. Examining music, theater, film, art, and festivals in Paris, Marseille, and Rouen, this book analyses approaches to antifascism and how they varied and interacted across different regions and left-wing traditions.
By combining revolutionary, republican, and working-class heritage, antifascists aimed to foster unifying identities to mobilize the French people. Simultaneously, the distinct outlooks of Communists, Radicals, and Socialists, in addition to the different visions among national figures in Paris and local activists, produced divergent understandings of antifascist culture, ultimately weakening the coalition. This study explains the political, social, and cultural context of the 1930s that generated these movements to break down barriers between ordinary citizens and French culture. It also explores how antifascists constructed the “French people,” an ambiguous concept that carried both social and civic connotations.
Aimed at a scholarly audience, this volume engages with historians of modern France and the interwar period in Europe and will interest researchers in antifascist and fascist studies, as well as the fields of cultural politics, republicanism, communism, socialism, and national and regional identity.
Tel Quel famously went to China in 1974. Tel Quel was an important literary journal founded in 1960, to which many of the major names of ‘French theory’ contributed, including Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. The journal was edited by Philippe Sollers, who along with Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Marcelin Pleynet and the Éditions du Seuil editor François Wahl made the group for the China trip. Jacques Lacan was supposed to go but decided against at the last minute, according to Sollers using the pretext that his mistress had been unable to get a visa. They spent three weeks there, from 11 April to 4 May. The group were invited by the Chinese Embassy, through the mediation of Italian journalist and communist politician Maria Antonietta Macciocchi (on whom more in a future piece), but they paid for their own travel. It was an organised tour by the Luxingshe Travel Agency, with a planned itinerary including visits to schools, factories, farms, a hospital, museums and historical sites, dance and theatre performances, and political lectures. They visited Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Luoyang, Xi’an and then returned to Beijing. A planned visit to Yan’an was abandoned due to bad weather. They had no contact with non-approved Chinese people.
Three photographs of the Tel Quel group in China (taken from Threads), and the cover of the issue published later that year
All of the group subsequently wrote about the trip and China more generally – Tel Quel was going through a brief Maoist phase after breaking with the French Communist Party. Wahl’s articles appeared in four parts in Le Monde, between 15 and 19 June 1974.The journal devoted their autumn 1974 issue to the trip, “En Chine”, in which they criticised Wahl’s essays as reactionary. Pleynet contributed to that issue, and also published a piece in the next one. The second article says that it was an extract of a forthcoming book, Pourquoi la Chine to appear in the 10/18 series, though this never appeared (“Du discours sur la Chine”, 12 n. *). Not long afterwards, Kristeva wrote a book De Chinoises, published in October 1974. It was translated a few years later as About Chinese Women. It has been commissioned and written in a rush on her return:
These notes do not make up a book. They are simply a journal of facts and inquiries inspired by a trip… Women: the women of China. These notes have their origin in my attempt to deal with the tremendous and rapid changes in their condition. That is indeed the reason I wrote them, in such haste… Neither a scholarly book nor a subjective essay. This work leaves something to be desired (p. 5/p. 7).
This book was severely criticised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in an essay included in In Other Worlds.
Kristeva would also discuss the trip in some autobiographical pieces (such as “My Memory’s Hyberbole”, and her 1990 novel The Samurai has thinly disguised portraits of many of the people around the journal and dramatizes this trip. I believe at least parts of it are, however, fully fictional (Liliane Lazar is good on the novel generally, and I write about her portrayal of Émile Benveniste in it here). In place of his planned book, Pleynet published excerpts from his diary in 1980, with a preface from 1979 which reflects on the experience from a position of subsequent political disenchantment. There are reports that Barthes was often unhappy on the trip, staying in the minibus on one excursion, and spending the train journey to Nanjing reading Flaubert’s Bouvard et Péchuchet instead of looking at the scenery or talking to the rest of the group (Pleynet, Le Voyage en Chine, p. 51). With that book as his reading matter it feels like there is a joke to be made about people blundering into areas of knowledge they are little suited to comprehending fully, before moving onto another topic when they become disillusioned with it.
After a previous trip to Asia, Barthes had written a short book about Japan, The Empire of Signs. His editor Anne Herschberg Pierrot says he planned to do similar here: “Right from the start, Barthes had been thinking of bringing back a text from China. He filled three notebooks on this theme, in blue biro or felt-tip” (Carnets, 8; Travels,p.viii). He also made an index of those notebooks, presumably as a next step to turning the notes into a more thematic treatment. The Empire of Signs is made up of a series of short texts and images, rather than presenting an overall argument. But in his lifetime, Barthes published only a short piece about his experience in China – “Alors, la Chine?” “So, how was China?” It first appeared in Le Monde and was reprinted as a small brochure in October 1975, with a brief additional afterword. Among other themes, Barthes indicates the ‘briques’ of discourse, of pre-prepared political speeches, a “series of commonplaces (topoi and clichés) analogous to those sub-routines that cybernetics refers to as briques”, bricks, modules or building blocks (“Alors, la Chine?” p. 14; “So, how was China?” p. 100). At the time of the Cultural Revolution, this was often the campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius, or “Pi Lin Pi Kong”. Barthes also briefly mentions the trip in an interview with Bernard-Henri Levy in 1977 (“A Quoi sert un intellectuel”, pp. 369-70; “Of What Use is an Intellectual?”, pp. 264-65).
From early in his notebooks Barthes realised he was struggling to find a purpose to writing about the trip:
All these notes will probably attest to the failure, in this country, of my writing (in comparison with Japan). In fact, I can’t find anything to note down, to enumerate, to classify (Carnets, 73; Travels,p. 57).
[For a week, I haven’t felt any opening up in my writing, any jouissance in it. Dry. Sterile.] (Carnets, 92;Travels,p. 75).
One possibility for a text on China would be to sweep across it [balayer], from the most serious, the most structured (the burning political issues) to the subtlest, most futile things (chilli, peonies). (Carnets, 111;Travels,p. 95).
In the end he abandoned the idea, and the published version is of course fragmentary and thematically disparate. It is interesting and revealing, although private and unguarded.
A few pages of Barthes’s notebooks were reproduced in the catalogue of a Centre Pompidou exhibition in 2002 – R/B: Roland Barthes (pp. 208-25). The notebooks were transcribed and published in full in 2009, and translated into English in 2011. It is sometimes remarked that the English title Travels in China misses the notebook aspect of the Carnets du voyage en Chine, making it seem a bit more like a finished work. A report he had made to his students at the EPHE was also included in Le Lexique de l’auteur in 2010. In his notebooks he spends a lot of time complaining, about boredom, insomnia, migraines, the weather and the ideological limits placed on the Chinese and their access to them. He did like the food and calligraphy but found other aspects less appealing. He was disturbed by the “complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero” (Carnets, 23; Travels,p.9). He was troubled by the lack of any sexual sensibility and bored of the endless political lectures. When they were published, Barthes’s notebooks were discussed by both China experts and Barthes scholars – see, for example, Harold Swindall’s review and the special issue of Textual Practice. A piece by Dora Zhang also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.While the Textual Practice issue has articles on other parts of Barthes’s journals, notably the Mourning Diary he kept after the loss of his mother, it includes three pieces on the China notebooks: Lucy O’Meara, “Barthes and Antonioni in China: The Muffling of Criticism”; Andy Stafford, “Roland Barthes’s Travels in China: Writing a Diary of Dissidence within Dissidence?” and Neil Badmington, “Bored with Barthes: Ennui in China”. Ottmar Ette, “Roland Barthes ou la multiplication des paysages de l’Est”, discusses it in terms of a wider intellectual geography of Barthes’s work. Swindell sees the notebooks as a valuable insight into a specific historical moment, revealing both for what they say of China but also for the perspective of a Westerner, “a record of a highly unusual East-West encounter that took place in a bygone era” (p. 423).
It’s hardly an unknown story, and the trip has been discussed in lots of other places including Patrick ffrench’s study of Tel Quel, The Time of Theory, the books on Tel Quel by Danielle Marx-Scouras, Niilo Kauppi and Philippe Forest, the biographies of Barthes and Kristeva… Some of the other references I know include Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, chapter 5; Eric R.J. Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, chapter 3; Alex Hughes’s article “Bodily Encounters with China: On Tour with Tel Quel”. Chapter 6 of Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East criticises the wider political issues around the group’s Maoism; Catherine Dossin looks at the wider interest in Maoism, particularly the work of Macciocchi and the painter Gérard Fromanger, who visited China shortly after the Tel Quel group. The wider phenomenon of Western visits to China during the Cultural Revolution is discussed by Paul Hollander in Political Pilgrims, Chapter 7, and in Gavin Healy’s forthcoming book A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests (Cornell University Press, June 2026).
In 2019 Qingya Meng wrote a book about the trip, L’échec du voyage en Chine (1974), de Sollers, Kristeva, Pleynet et Barthes, based on a thesis from 2017. It’s a useful discussion of the different sources for information about the trip. Most recently, Jean Berthier has written about this visit in a book-length study: Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine. It’s described as a novel, but it is so documentary that it reads almost as a history. Of course, the dialogue has had to be imagined, but it matches with most of what the voyagers recorded and the other accounts.
The photographs above are taken from Threads; there are some others on Philippe Sollers’s website. There are some of Chinese women in Kristeva’s book.
References
Marianne Alphant and Nathalie Léger eds. R/B: Roland Barthes, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002.
Neil Badmington, “Bored with Barthes: Ennui in China”, Textual Practice 30 (2), 2016, 305-25.
Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes, Geneva: Skira, 1970, reprinted in Œuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty, Paris: Seuil, five volumes, 2002, Vol III, 347-444; Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Roland Barthes, “Alors, la Chine?” Le Monde, 24 May 1974, 1, 14; republished with postface as Alors la Chine? Christian Bourgois, 1975; reprinted in Œuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty, Paris: Seuil, five volumes, 2002, Vol IV, 516-20; “So, How Was China?” in ‘The “Scandal” of Marxism’ and Other Writings on Politics, trans. Chris Turner, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2015, 94-104.
Roland Barthes, “A Quoi sert un intellectuel”, Œuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty, Paris: Seuil, five volumes, 2002, Vol V, 364-82; “Of What Use is an Intellectual?” in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962- 1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, 258-80.
Roland Barthes, Carnets du voyage en Chine,ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot, Paris: Christian Bourgois/IMEC, 2009; Travels in China, trans. Andrew Brown, Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
Roland Barthes, “Compte rendu du voyage en Chine”, in Le Lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études 1973–1974, ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot, Paris: Seuil, 2010, 227-45.
Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil: 26 octobre 1977—15 septembre 1979, ed. Nathalie Léger, Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2009; Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977—September 15, 1979, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
Jean Berthier, Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine, Le Cherche Midi, 2026.
Catherine Dossin, “«Alors la Chine?» The Journeys of Parisian Intellectuals to China in 1974”, in Zheng Yangwen ed. The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
Ottmar Ette, “Roland Barthes ou la multiplication des paysages de l’Est”, Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 94 (3), 2016, 583-95.
Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 1960–1983, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995.
Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel: 1960-1982, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995.
Eric R.J. Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1998 [1981].
Alex Hughes, “Bodily Encounters with China: On Tour with Tel Quel”, Modern and Contemporary France 14 (1), 2006, 49-62.
Niilo Kauppi, The Making of an Avant-Garde: Tel Quel, Berlin: Mouton, 1994.
Julia Kristeva, Des Chinoises,Éditions des Femmes, 1974; About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows, New York: Urizen, 1977.
Julia Kristeva, Les samouraïs, Paris: Fayard, 1990; The Samurai: A Novel, trans. Barbara Bray, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Julia Kristeva, “Mémoires”, L’Infini 1, 1983, 39-54; “My Memory’s Hyperbole” in The Portable Kristeva,ed. Kelly Oliver, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 3-21.
Liliane Lazar,“When the ‘Samurai’ Meet the ‘Mandarins’”, Simone de Beauvoir Studies 13, 1996, 66-77.
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Lucy O’Meara, “Barthes and Antonioni in China: The Muffling of Criticism”, Textual Practice 30 (2), 2016, 267-86.
Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame”, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Routledge, 1998, Chapter 9.
Andy Stafford, “Roland Barthes’s Travels in China: Writing a Diary of Dissidence within Dissidence?” Textual Practice30 (2), 2016, 287-304.
Harold Swindell, “Roland Barthes. Travels in China”, China Review International 19 (3), 2012, 419-23.
“En Chine”, Tel Quel 59, 1974.
François Wahl, “La Chine sans utopie I: Pi Lin pi Kong”, Le Monde, 15 June 1974, 1, 7.
François Wahl, “La Chine sans utopie II: Tien an men ou l’explication avec le modèle soviétique”, Le Monde, 17 June 1974, 4.
François Wahl, “La Chine sans utopie III: Staline, ou l’ennemi principal, c’est le révisionnisme”, Le Monde, 18 June 1974, 6.
François Wahl, “La Chine sans utopie IV: Révolution Culturelle ou occidentalisation”, Le Monde, 19 June 1974, 8.
Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
This is the 70th 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. They 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. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. This book explores how hell became a place for literary experiments with local challenges in theology and identity. Following the reception and transformations of two popular hell apocrypha, it argues that they served as this role because of their liminal textual authority. As noncanonical scriptures, apocrypha afforded medieval writers space to revise their hells (since they were not actually scripture), while also encouraging readers to revere those experiments as valid (since they seemed like scripture). The book brings together adaptations from early medieval England, Iceland, Ireland, and Wales, placing the early vernacular theologies of the North Sea in comparative conversation.
Exploring John Berger’s political and creative praxis for scholarship on space, place, landscape and spatial experience, Ben Garlick and Dubravka Sekulic critically engage with his work as a writer, critic, collaborator, playwright, filmmaker and artist. The contributors connect Berger’s work to cultural geography, including through a photo essay that articulates personal encounters with place, as well as discussion of his notion of “confabulation” and what it offers for writing cultural geographies. Each chapter delves into themes like Berger’s interest in questions of representation, migration, ethics and the limits of political action.
Garlick and Sekulic underline Berger’s enduring relevance and resonance for contemporary academic, conceptual and worldly developments. In doing so, contributors – hailing from both within and beyond the ‘discipline’ of geography – emphasise and celebrate the value of cross-disciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and experimentation that crosses boundaries, begets conversations, and offers novel insights into our lived worlds and their processes.
This collection of original essays brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the influence and importance of Parmenides to Heidegger’s quest to bring about the end of philosophy according to its own beginning. While the significance of Plato and Aristotle to Martin Heidegger’s philosophical development in the 1920s and 1930s is well documented, the role of Parmenides remains relatively obscure. From Heidegger’s thinking prior to Being and Time and after it, toward his thought of The Event, Parmenides is a constant presence within Heidegger’s developing concern to overcome metaphysics, and so restore for thinking the original question of being.
This book makes the case that, without Parmenides, philosophy could not be philosophy, and Heidegger could not be Heidegger.
How can we better understand global issues? And what does it mean to do international relations theory today?
Concepts in International Relations offers a fresh and accessible introduction to IR theory through the lens of the key concepts that shape our world – power, security, race, gender, the environment, and more. Unlike traditional textbooks, this book treats concepts not just as tools but as the very foundation of international thinking and practice.
Concepts don’t just describe the world – they make it. Politicians, scholars and activists all use them to frame debates, justify actions and imagine alternatives. By interpreting and reimagining these concepts, theory becomes a powerful way to engage with global politics.
This book is the essential companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students approaching IR or IR theory for the first time.
The definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory
“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.
Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.
Studies nonviolence as a way of knowing, doing and being in armed conflict
Discusses the practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) in South Sudan, Indonesia, Kosovo, Albania, the US, Northern Ireland, Syria, Israel and Palestine
Draws together feminist theorising from International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Critical Geography and Critical Military Studies
Challenges the centrality of violence in academic work relating to armed conflict by de-centring and displacing violent epistemological and ontological frameworks
Addresses the key conceptual building blocks of embodiment, space and temporality
Directly engages with assumptions around the efficacy and legitimacy of violence in the protection of civilians
This book takes the emerging practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection as a case study of nonviolence to interrogate the roles of violence and nonviolence in conflict knowledge production. By focusing on nonviolent actors using UCP, it decentres violence, which is often so prominent in peace research. This approach creates space to fundamentally reimagine how the world might be when imagined and enacted through nonviolence.
Drawing together feminist theorising from critical military studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations, Nonviolent Encounters argues that decentring violence in conflict knowledge production upsets the simple binaries of protector/protected and war/peace, underpinned by the ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology of much Western conflict knowledge. Instead, space is created to reconsider nonviolence, not as the binary opposite of violence, but as a way of knowing, doing and being – as a way of producing alternative ontological worlds.
In a previous piece in this series, I discussed Georges Dumézil’s student and colleague Lucien Gerschel and their discussions of the Roman general Coriolanus. Gerschel had attended lectures by Dumézil at the École Pratique des Hautes Études shortly before the Second World War. Dumézil describes him as “one of the most constant and most original of my auditors” (Mariages indo-européens, p. 21). He was attending Dumézil’s lectures alongside Roger Caillois, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt and Élisabeth Raucq in the late 1930s, and seems to have gone into hiding during the war because he was Jewish (see Mariages indo-européens, p. 26). After the war he attended Dumézil’s lectures until the very last one in 1968 (Le Roman des jumeaux, p. 218), as well as those of Émile Benveniste. He became an interesting scholar in his own right in the 1950s. Dumézil supervised his research, supported his career and Gerschel provided research support to him, including correcting proofs of his books. (There is more about Gerschel’s work in the earlier piece.)
Gerschel’s notes on Benveniste’s post-war lectures were the raw material from which Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, was shaped. The transcripts were typed up, Benveniste edited them, and then worked with Jean Lallot and series editor Pierre Bourdieu in getting them into the final form. I have remarked before that the work done on this text was just in time, because Benveniste’s stroke in December 1969 put an end to his writing and lecturing career. But until recently I hadn’t realised how close it also was to Gerschel’s death.
Gerschel’s death has puzzled me for a while. I knew it was in the early 1970s, since Dumézil’s return to the Coriolanus story in the third volume of his Mythe et Épopée in 1973 is in tribute to him. This would have been quite young if he was a student in the 1930s. Dumézil mentions his death in the 1973 preface to the second edition of the first volume of Mythe et Épopée (p. 27), in a way which indicates it happened after the first edition of 1968. C. Scott Littleton refers to him as “the late Lucien Gerschel” in the introduction to Dumézil’s Gods of the Ancient Northmen, also in 1973(p. xv). Dumézil said in 1979 that a posthumous collection of his essays was in preparation, to be edited by Georges Charachidzé (Mariages indo-européens, p. 22 n. 1). Hervé Coutau-Bégarie notes that this collection was due to rescue Gerschel “from oblivion” and was “ardently desired” by Dumézil (L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil, pp. 199-200). This collection was never published. But I couldn’t find any notice of Gerschel beyond those mentions. The only record I could find of someone with that name had a birth date which seemed possible, but said he died in the 1980s, which indicated this was a different person.
One of the last tasks in the revision of this draft of my manuscript on Benveniste and Dumézil has been going back over some texts I’d read before, but which I wanted to revisit. This included Dumézil’s last major project, the Esquisses de mythologie, of which he published three volumes of twenty-five sketches – ideas or short essays which he says that he lacked the time to complete himself, but which he hoped others might pick up, develop, criticise or otherwise engage with. He was in his mid-eighties when the first volume of Esquisses appeared, and a fourth volume appeared after his death. When I first read the Esquisses I was thinking of different things and had missed material relevant to Gerschel. Two things in this re-reading were interesting in relation to Gerschel and Coriolanus.
One was that Dumézil returns to the Coriolanus story in “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, esquisse 17 in Apollon sonore et autres essais. The second was that Dumézil mentions Gerschel’s tragic demise in 1983, in esquisse 47 in La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés. This is a text about the Finnish national epic the Kalevala and the magical object of the sampo:
Gerschel mourut en 1970, dans des circonstances très pénibles. Trouvé mort sur la voie publique, sans papiers, il ne fut identifié que plusieurs mois plus tard, alors que j’étais à Chicago, et ses abondants dossiers ont disparu. Aucun Nachlass ne subsiste de ce grand érudit, sinon dans ma mémoire, le souvenir plus ou moins précise de projets dont il m’avait fait confidence, et quelques notes que j’ai jointes aux brouillons de mes cours du Collège de France. Sept ans plus tard, invité à contribuer à un volume qui se préparait en Amérique, en l’honneur de mon ami, le folkloriste turc Pertev Naili Boratav, je voulus associer Gerschel à cet hommage et, sous nos deux signatures, je mis en forme sa note sur la production du sampo. Notre article parut en anglais en 1978, dans Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, publié par Ilhan Başgöz et Marc Glaser (Indiana University), pages 89-94.
Gerschel died in 1970, in very tragic circumstances. Found dead on the street, with no identification papers, he was not identified until several months later, while I was in Chicago, and his extensive papers have disappeared. No Nachlass remains of this great scholar, except in my memory: the more or less precise recollection of projects he had confided in me, and a few notes I appended to the drafts of my Collège de France lectures. Seven years later, invited to contribute to a volume being prepared in America in honour of my friend the Turkish folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav, I wanted to include Gerschel in this tribute and under both our names I edited his note on the production of the sampo. Our article appeared in English in 1978 in Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, published by Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser [actually ‘Mark Glazer’] (Indiana University), pages 89-94 (La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, p. 212).
Dumézil was in Chicago between October 1969 and March 1970, giving the Haskell lectures and working at the Chicago Divinity School, to which he had been invited by Mircea Eliade. Dumézil’s note therefore seems a bit confused on the chronology. If Gerschel died in 1970, and the identification was “several months later”, how could this be when Dumézil was still in Chicago? Perhaps he died when Dumézil was away in Chicago, and was identified after his return.
I have seen some of those notes by Gerschel in Dumézil’s archive at the Collège de France – he would send references, examples or other things relevant to Dumézil’s concerns, and Dumézil would keep them with the lecture notes. Dumézil’s handwriting is shocking, but his courses are very organised, numbering and dating each lecture, and indicating where something has been placed if he took material out of the sequence for use elsewhere. I hadn’t realised until rereading the Esquisses how relatively rare these traces of Gerschel were.
Given Dumézil’s mention of it, I went looking for the Gerschel and Dumézil text on the sampo published as the English chapter in 1978. The first place I went was the very useful L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil to check the reference. In the bibliographical entry on that English chapter, Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel:
avait eu l’intuition, en 1965, du caractère trifonctionnel d’un episode du Kalevala, la fabrication d’un objet magique, le sampo. Il est mort en 1970 sans avoir publié sa découverte. Des parents éloignés, ignares et uniquement soucieux d’argent, ont dispersé sa bibliothèque et versé à la décharge ‘ses abondants dossiers’.
had discerned in 1965 the trifunctional character of an episode of the Kalevala, the fabrication of a magical object, the sampo. He died in 1970 without having published his discovery. Distant relatives, ignorant and only caring for money, sold off his library and dumped ‘his extensive papers’ at the rubbish tip (p. 134).
Cover of Studies in Turkish Folklore, which contains Gerschel’s posthumous text
The Festschrift was available in the Bodleian library in Oxford. Dumézil’s contribution is mainly in editing Gerschel’s text, and he only wrote a short paragraph to preface it. As far as I’m aware the French text is unpublished. Here’s Dumézil’s brief introduction:
In this Feschrift [sic] in honor of my dear friend (who was in Istanbul at the beginning of my university life, and who was the most brilliant of listeners and the most efficient of assistants), I would like to evoque and invite, the one who was for thirty years, until my retirement, my most constant and original collaborator in Paris, Lucien Gershel. He has published important articles, but when he died tragically in the beginning of 1970, while I was teaching in Chicago, his Nachlass was dispersed: nothing remains. I had, however, numerous joint projects which we had worked on together. In view of this “chain of friendship” which is one of the joys of our lives as researchers, I have edited for you this one which if I remember correctly dates from the fifties.—G.D. (p. 89)
Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel’s text dates from 1965, not the 1950s (p. 135). I know of no other mentions of Gerschel’s death, or the disposal of his papers, or what the collection due to be edited by Charachidzé might have contained. But the notes from Dumézil and Coutau-Bégarie which I’d previously missed have opened up a little window on this story. When Dumézil died in 1986 the last volume of his Esquisses was in draft, and was published eight years later, edited by Joël H. Grisward. Esquisses 84-87 are on the Kalevala, and number 84 continues the discussion of sampo.
References
Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 volumes,Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969; Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: Hau Books, 2016; originally published as Indo-European Language and Society, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Economica, 1998
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I: L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuple indo-européens, Paris: Gallimard, second edition, 1974 [1968].
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée III: Histoires romaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Georges Dumézil, Mariages indo-européens, suivi de Quinze questions romaines, Paris: Payot, 1979.
Georges Dumézil, “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, Apollon sonore et autres essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, 164-70.
Georges Dumézil, “La Fabrication du sampo”,La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, 209-18.
Georges Dumezil, Le Roman des jumeaux et autres essais, ed. Joël H. Grisward, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Georges Dumezil and Lucien Gerschel, “The Production of the Sampo”, trans. Mark and Diane Glazer, in Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser eds. Studies in Turkish Folklore: In Honor of Pertev N. Boratav, Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1978, 89-94.
Lucien Gerschel, “Coriolan”, Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, Paris: Armand Colin, two volumes, 1953, Vol II, 33-40.
C. Scott Littleton, “Introduction Part I”, in Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, ed. Einar Haugen, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, ix-xliii.
This is the 69th 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. They 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. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
