Huguette Fugier’s 1963 book Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine seems little known today, which is unfortunate given its interest and importance. In the opening lines, she describes it is “a study of historical semantics, applied to the Roman notion of the ‘sacred’” (p. 9).

Fugier is an intriguing figure. According to the Bibliothèque nationale database, she was born in 1926 and died in 2022. After studying in Lyon and teaching in Grenoble, for most of her career she taught at the University of Strasbourg. She wrote a short piece on recent publications on the sacred in 1980, and wrote the chapter on “Sémantique du «sacre» en latin” in a collective work in 1983. That chapter is something of a summary of her earlier book, with some updated references. She was also a vocal opponent of the Algeria war, and later worked in Côte-d’Ivoire and with Amnesty International (on her biography, this piece by Jeannette Boulay is helpful). She did not work exclusively on Latin, with her later book publications on Malagasy, such as Syntaxe Malgache. 

In Archaic Roman Religion, first published in 1966, Georges Dumézil praises the significance of Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine, noting that it had appeared after he had first drafted his text (French, p. 142 n. 1; English Vol I, 129 n. 1), but mentioning it in some notes (French, pp. 143-45 and 574 n. 1; English Vol I, 130-31, Vol II, 583 n. 12). Dumézil was repaying her appreciative assessment of his work which had appeared in the Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse in 1965. She also wrote a positive review of Archaic Roman Religion in 1968. For good or bad she was associated with his approach – Dumézil’s longtime opponent Henrik Wagenvoort saw her as part of an attack on his work (Pietas, p. 250 n. 46), and reviewed Recherches sur l’expression du sacré quite critically in Gnomon in 1966. Her work preceded the publication of Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, though that book was based on earlier lectures, and he does not cite her work. She references his work in her 1983 chapter on the topic.

In Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben indicates the importance of Recherches sur l’expression du sacré:

In a well-documented study, Huguette Fugier has shown how the doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred [sacro] penetrates into the sphere of linguistics and ends by having its stronghold there (Recherches, pp. 238–40). A decisive role in this process is played precisely by homo sacer (Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, p. 87; The Omnibus Homo Sacer, p. 67).

In one of the indented asides in his book following shortly afterwards, Agamben notes:

It is interesting to follow the exchanges documented in Fugier’s work between anthropology, linguistics, and sociology concerning the problem of the sacred. Pauly-Wissowa’s “Sacer” article, which is signed by R. Ganschinietz (1920) and explicitly notes Durkheim’s theory of ambivalence (as Fowler had already done for Robertson Smith), appeared between the second edition of Walde’s Wörterbuch and the first edition of Ernout-Meillet’s Dictionnaire. As for Ernout-Meillet, Fugier notes the strict links that linguistics had with the Parisian school of sociology (in particular with Mauss and Durkheim). When Roger Caillois published Man and the Sacred in 1939, he was thus able to start off directly with a lexical given, which was by then considered certain: “We know, following Ernout-Meillet’s definition, that in Rome the word sacer designated the person or the thing that one cannot touch without dirtying oneself or without dirtying” (L’homme et le sacré, p. 22). (Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 88; The Omnibus Homo Sacer, p. 67).

This is the only reference he makes to her work in this book and indeed in the whole Homo Sacer series. There are a lot of possible references to explore here, from William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) – used by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo – through Alois Walde’s Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, to Richard Ganschinietz’s article in the Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, whose later editor was Georg Wissowa. (Often known simply as Pauly-Wissowa, the English translation of Homo Sacer erroneously refers to this work as “Pauly-Wilson”.) The Fowler text mentioned is “The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer”, published in the first issue of The Journal of Roman Studies in 1911. Fowler indicates that “no one will deny that the homo sacer is a survival from a primitive age into one of highly developed civil and religious law. Sacer esto is in fact a curse; and the homo sacer on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous” (p. 58). As Fowler indicates, Robertson Smith discusses a parallel figure in Semitic contexts (see “Additional Note B”, pp. 446-54).

Agamben also mentions Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet’s Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, whose first edition was in 1932, which is first quoted directly and then referenced in Caillois’s quotation. In the more recent Gallimard printing of L’Homme et le sacré the passage is on p. 46. In the English translation Man and the Sacred, the definition is rendered as “the one or that which cannot be touched without defilement” (p. 35). The entry on “sacer” appears in the 1951 second edition of Ernout and Meillet’s Dictionnaire on pp. 1033-35, with the words quoted by Caillois and then Agamben on p. 1034: “Sacer désigne celui ou ce qui ne peut être touché sans être souillé, ou sans souiller”, and continues “de là le double sens de ‘sacré’ ou ‘maudit’ [hence the double meaning of ‘sacred’ or ‘cursed/damned’]”. 

These references connect in multiple ways to my current research – Meillet was one of Benveniste and Dumézil’s teachers, and when I’ve spoken about their work I’ve suggested that their early formation can be understood both within a French linguistic tradition and a sociological-anthropological one, of which Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss are the key figures in the generation after Durkheim. Caillois gave five lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in February-March 1939 which became Man and the Sacred. They were given in the middle of a Dumézil course which became his Mitra-Varuna in 1940. Dumézil uses analyses from the Pauly-Wissowa Encyclopedia in that book – when I was editing the recent edition of that text, it took me some time to find an incorrect reference in it, as I mention here.

The section being referenced by Agamben to Fugier’s book is “Réflexion de méthode”, and it does indeed reference all the works Agamben indicates. Fugier also mentions Theodor Mommsen’s Römisches Strafrecht [Roman Criminal Law] – her reference is to Vol III, p. 235 n. 1, which I think it is p. 901 n. 3 of the composite edition, with a discussion that continues to 902 nn. 1-2. Fugier also indicates Durkheim’s The Elemental Forms of Religious Life, mentioned by Ganschinietz, and concerning the links between the French sociological school and the linguistic tradition points to Joseph Vendryes’s obituary of Meillet (see especially pp. 25-26, 33-34).

The main classical source for a definition of the notion of a homo sacer comes from Sextus Pompeius Festus. This is quoted, for example, by Agamben himself: “homo sacer is est, quem populus iudicavit ob maleficium; neque fas est eum immolari, sed qui occidit parricidi non damnatur [The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide]” (Homo Sacer, p. 79; The Omnibus Homo Sacer, p. 61).

The passage from Festus also appears in Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, immediately after a discussion of Hubert and Mauss, where Benveniste glosses the quotation as:

A man who is called sacer is stained with a real pollution which puts him outside human society: contact with him must be shunned. If someone kills him, this does not count as homicide. The homo sacer is for men what the sacer animal is for the gods: neither has anything in common with the world of men (French, Vol I, p. 189; English p. 461). 

In interpreting this phrase Agamben also makes use of Harold Bennett’s 1930 analysis in “Sacer esto”. Bennett’s conclusion is important: “the pronouncement of the death sentence by the people was in the later part of the Republic almost unknown, and with its virtual disappearance the sacer homo became the subject of an antiquarian’s definition rather than a figure of Roman life” (p. 18).

It is also worth noting that Festus’ definition is actually a sentence in an entry about Sacer Mons, a sacred mountain consecrated to Jupiter (book XVII). Festus’ text is an epitome of a work by Verrius Flaccus, De verborum significatione, and Festus’ epitome mainly survives through a further epitome by Paul the Deacon. Only part of a manuscript of Festus’ text survives. The edition used by Agamben is the 1846 bi-lingual Latin-French version by M. A. Savagner – the passage about Sacer Mons is in Volume II, pp. 571-72. This appears to be the only translation of the work into a modern language. Fugier uses Wallace M. Lindsay’s 1913 German edition of the Latin, where the reference is pp. 423-24. There is a more recent edition of the fragmentary manuscript, Il Festo farnesiano, and a commentary on the letter ‘N’, the first to survive in full, by Paolo Pieroni. A Festus Lexicon Project was set up to produce a more reliable text and an English translation, but progress has been slow. Their site is available at the Wayback Machine. Fay Glinister and Clare Woods’s collection Verrius, Festus, & Paul, which developed from that project, is a helpful guide to the history of the texts and debates.

I know relatively few pieces which discuss Fugier alongside Agamben. Thomas Berns, “Du Sacer au Sanctus”, uses Fugier and Benveniste to question some aspects of Agamben’s argument, particularly in terms of stressing the legal rather just religious aspects of sanctus as a sanction (especially, p. 449). Michèle Lowrie indicates that “Agamben cites only Festus because he is not interested in the historical development of these ideas; they are timeless to him” (p. 35 n. 12). That it certainly not the case for Fugier, for Benveniste or Dumézil. 

In the abridged Der Kleine Pauly, for the entry on “sacer” Dumézil’s Archaic Roman Religion and Fugier’s Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine are given as two key sources (Vol IV, columns 1486-87). In the most recent edition, Der Neue Pauly, as well as a reference to Fugier, a reference is made to Roberto Fiori, Homo sacer: Dinamica politico-costituzionale di una sanzione giuridico-religiosa [Political and constitutional dynamics of a legal-religious sanction], which is not a book I knew about before (Vol X, column 1195). Fiori’s Homo sacer was published in 1996 and is an almost 600-page major study. There is a useful review by Annie Dubourdieu. Imagine the misfortune of publishing a book on that theme, painstaking and philological, which must have been under way for years, shortly after Agamben’s book of the same title!

In the collection he edited, Autour de la notion de sacer, Thibaud Lanfranchi recognises the importance of Fugier’s work (pp. 7-8, 9-10, 12, 15). He mentions the work of Fiori, among others, and includes a chapter by him in the collection. He sees Agamben’s work as bringing an external perspective, from philosophy, into the more historical and lexical debates about the terms. The hint is that some aspects of Agamben’s work might not stand up to scrutiny by more historically and linguistically trained readers. As has sometimes been said of Foucault too, the danger in these philosophical-historical accounts is that people uncritically accept their representation of the historical past, without doing any more detailed analysis themselves. As has been shown by Robert Jacob, Fugier and Fiori’s much more extensive and thorough analyses would be valuable guides in that work. 

References

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1995; Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [1998], in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Harold Bennett, “Sacer esto”, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 61, 1930, 5-18.

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.

Thomas Berns, “Du Sacer au Sanctus: contre Agamben à partir du droit romain”, Archiv für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie 102 (3), 2016, 441-54.

Jeannette Boulay, “FUGIER Huguette, Charlotte, Andrée”, 22 novembre 2008, Le Maitron dictionnaire biographique,https://maitron.fr/fugier-huguette-charlotte-andree/

Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacré, Paris: Libraries Ernest Leroux, 1939; second edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1950, Folio Essais, 1989; Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash, Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959.

Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider eds. Der Neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, Stuttgart & Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1996-2003.

Annie Dubourdieu, “R. Fiori. Homo Sacer. Dinamica politico-costituzionale di una sanzione giuridico-religiosa”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 215 (4), 1998, 517-19.

Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna: Essai sur deux representations indo-européennes de la Souveraineté, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940, second edition Paris: Gallimard, 1948; Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, trans. Derek Coltman, ed. Stuart Elden, Chicago: Hau, 2023 (open access at https://haubooks.org/mitra-varuna/)

Georges Dumézil, La réligion romaine archaïque, Paris: Payot, 1966; second edition, 1974; Archaic Roman Religion, trans. Philip Krapp, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, two volumes, 1970.

Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, Paris: C. Klincksieck, second edition, 1951 [1932]. 

Sextus Pompeius Festus, De la signification des mots, Latin-French edition, trans. M. A. Savagner, Paris: C. L. F. Panckoucke, two volumes, 1846 (available at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k23657q and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k236582).

Sexti Pompei Festi De Verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome, Wallace M. Lindsay, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1913 (available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101077773990&seq=9).

Sextus Pompeius Festus, Il Festo farnesiano (Cod. Neapol. IV. A.3), ed. Alessandro Moscadi, Firenze: Università degli studi di Firenze, 2001.

Roberto Fiori, Homo sacer: Dinamica politico-costituzionale di una sanzione giuridico-religiosa, Naples: Jovene Editore, 1996.

W. Warde Fowler, “The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer”, The Journal of Roman Studies 1, 1911, 57-63.

Huguette Fugier, Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963.

Huguette Fugier, “Quarante ans de recherches dans l’idéologie indo-européenne: la méthode de Georges Dumézil”, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse 45, 1965, 358-74.

Huguette Fugier, “G. Dumézil: La religion romaine archaïque, suivi d’un Appendice sur La religion des Étrusques…”, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 48 (2), 1968, 182- 85.

Huguette Fugier, “Deux our trois mots sur le sacré”, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 60 (1), 1980, 81-84.

Huguette Fugier, “Sémantique du «sacre» en latin”, in Julien Ries et. al., L’expression du sacré dans les grandes religions II: Peuples indo-européens et asianiques, hindouisme, bouddhisme, religion égyptienne, gnosticisme, islam, Louvain-la-Neuve: Centre d’histoire des religions, 1983, 25-85. 

Huguette Fugier, Syntaxe Malgache, Louvain: Institut de linguistique de Louvain, 1999.

Richard Ganschienietz, “Sacer”, in Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, eds. Georg Wissowa, Wilhelm Kroll, and Karl Mittelhaus, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlerscche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1931, Band I A,2, columns 1626-29 (available at https://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2010/09/emerging-open-access-paulys.html)

Fay Glinister and Clare Woods with J.A. North and M.H. Crawford eds. Verrius, Festus, & Paul: Lexicography, Scholarship, & Society, London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007.

Robert Jacob, “La question romaine du sacer: Ambivalence du sacré ou construction symbolique de la sortie du droit”, Revue Historique 639, 2006, 523-88.

Thibaud Lanfranchi, “Introduction”, in Thibaud Lanfranchi ed., Autour de la notion de sacer, Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2017, 7-16, https://books.openedition.org/efr/3374

Thibaud Lanfranchi ed., Autour de la notion de sacer, Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2017, https://books.openedition.org/efr/3374

Michèle Lowrie, “Sovereignty before the Law: Agamben and the Roman Republic”, Law and Humanities 1, 2007, 31-55. 

Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1899 (available at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_eQQMAAAAYAAJ)

Paolo Pieroni, Marcus Verrius Flaccus’ De significatu verborum in den Auszügen von Sextus Pompeius Festus und Paulus Diaconus: Einleitung und Teilkommentar (154,19-186,29 Lindsay), Frankfurt & Oxford: Lang, 2004. 

William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, ed. Stanley A. Cook, New York: Macmillan, third edition, 1927.

Joseph Vendryes, “Antoine Meillet”, Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris 38, 1937, 1-42; abbreviated version published as “Antoine Meillet”, École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques. Annuaire 1937-1938, 1937, 5-37.

Hendrik Wagenvoort, “Huguette Fugier, Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine”, G nomon 4, 1966, 380-84.

Hendrik Wagenvoort, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980.

Alois Walde, Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, third edition, 1938 (available at https://archive.org/details/walde)

Konrat Ziegler and Walther Sontheimer eds. Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike, München: Aldred Druckenmüller, five volumes, 1964-75.

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This is the 49th post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, 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.