In the previous update on the research for this project, I said I had begun work on a chapter on Dumézil’s career from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. That has also been the main focus on this last month too, trying to weave together a story of the books with the career and political questions of this period. Much of this period is familiar to me from the work editing Mitra-Varuna, though I’ve been digging a bit deeper into the story. One thing I’m trying to do is show how many of Dumézil’s books developed out of courses, for which the various teaching records are really helpful. I’ve been pulling various works of mythology and early Roman history off the shelves at home to check things and I’m grateful I have so many of these – and that things like the Perseus digital library and the Internet Archive exist. The former has many classical texts, in original language and translation; and the latter is invaluable for checking Dumézil’s references to older books that would otherwise require tracking down obscure copies in various libraries. There is some of that, of course, but it’s a lot easier than it might be. I know from editing Mitra-Varuna that his references cannot always be trusted as complete and are sometimes inaccurate. In terms of the context, in drafting this chapter I’ve learned a bit more about Vichy laws concerning freemasons, and the work of the academic who became education minister, Jérôme Carcopino. I’ve been reading Ernst Jünger’s war journals, A German Officer in Occupied Paris, which are both fascinating and disturbing. Allan Mitchell’s book about Jünger at this time, The Devil’s Captain, is also useful. I’ve just begun to read Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of the Dark Years.
But, as ever, I’ve also been following some other lines of research. Some of this is related to the linguistic atlas project of Georges Redard, which I mentioned in a previous update, and most recently something of the work of his colleague Charles Kieffer. I also had a morning back at the Royal Asiatic Society archives for papers relating to the International Congress of Orientalists. These congresses were held in places across the world – all in Europe initially, then India, the USA, Australia, Mexico and Hong Kong in later years. The proceedings are interesting, many of which I’ve already looked at. Benveniste was a regular attender at the Congress, as were some of the other people my work is touching on, including Harold Bailey, Walter Henning and Redard. Each congress had a local organisation, and they were responsible for publishing the proceedings. But I don’t think there was a central organisation with archives held in one place. Michael Kemper’s interesting discussion of the 1960 congress held in Moscow, for example, makes use of archives in St Petersburg, and the archives of the American Council of Learned Societies at the Library of Congress. There is one quite interesting file about this Moscow congress in the National Archives in Kew. But the Royal Asiatic Society has a large box of papers, mainly consisting of correspondence between them and the different congress organisers over more than a century. Much of it is organisational, but there are some useful documents here, and it is especially helpful having material relating to so many of the congresses all in one place. In particular I was interested in a letter protesting possible German involvement in a future congress, given their actions during the war. But it was written in 1916, particularly concerning what they had done in Belgium. The box also includes the drinking horn donated to the congress by the King of Sweden in 1889, which the Royal Asiatic Society kept, and regularly insured so it could be taken to the various congresses. There is a photo here.
I’ve also been reading more about France’s military in the Second World War, trying to find out some information about Benveniste’s service before he was captured in June 1940. Researchers before me had, as far as I can tell, been unable to find much specific, partly due to his lowly status as a second-class soldier. I think I’ve found just a little more, and I say a bit about that line of research here. It took a bit of archival work and then following up leads in some published sources. I’m not sure how much more could be discovered, but the little I’ve found accords with other information which is better-documented – and coming to the same conclusion from two different directions provides support to each.
I went back to the Warburg archives again, to look at the correspondence they have from and to Alexandre Koyré. The specific content of the letters there isn’t especially relevant for this project, though Koyré is likely to be important in other ways. But I’m trying to get a sense of what material about or relating to Koyré is available in different archives for some possible future work. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve also been working on the piece about his failure to get elected to the Collège de France, on the basis of archival material.
In Paris I began work on the Benveniste papers at the Bibliothèque nationale – a much larger collection than the one held by the Collège de France, and more focused on his academic work. It was the last major collection in Paris for this project which I had not even begun to look. There is a lot, and I only consulted a few early bound volumes on this visit. There is some information about the contents online, and a few parts of this material are available digitally on Gallica, but much was a surprise. The boxes I’ve looked at are not organised by any obvious logic – there might be draft material for a late book, lecture notes, reading material, correspondence about visiting lectures or conferences, from the 1960s, 1940s and 1950s, all bound together as a heavy volume. The only way I know to work through this is by going through everything, fairly quickly, to make an inventory for myself, before going back to specific things at a later stage. I know that some of the other boxes contain more bound volumes, but some are unbound papers. There are 38 boxes in total, and each of the ones I’ve looked at so far have 400-600 pages of material. It’s going to take some time, and multiple visits, even to do the first pass through.
Last year I talked about how Benveniste’s former student and friend, Jean de Menasce, was also a friend and translator of T.S. Eliot. There are archives at Balliol College in Oxford which I visited. What I didn’t know at the time is that in these Paris papers (PapOr 36, folder 50), there are Benveniste’s translations of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Chloé Laplantine has dated these to 1947. As her abstract notes, there is no context to the translations in the file. But it was interesting to see them.
At the Collège de France I looked at some of their Benveniste material again, particularly material gathered by Redard about Benveniste’s time in Switzerland, and various Collège administrative papers relating to Dumézil’s election in 1949 and Koyré’s failure in 1951. Although Dumézil was elected, the voices against set out some clear lines of opposition to his project and his work. I also looked at a very few things from the Paul Pelliot, Antoine Meillet and Henri Hubert-Marcel Mauss collections. Antoine Meillet kept the letters from Prince Nicolai Trubetzkoy which outlined his position in the dispute he had with Dumézil in the 1930s, on which Jamie Phillips and Stefanos Geroulanos wrote an excellent piece a few years ago. All the documents about that in the Meillet papers I’ve seen are in the Dumézil archive too, but both Dumézil and Trubetzkoy sent copies of their pieces to prominent linguists, and it’s interesting that Meillet kept them. Meillet’s archive also has a few letters from Benveniste, from a very early period, which provided a tiny bit of detail on some almost empty parts of his biography. (I then discovered these were published, in a really obscure outlet, which I’m trying to locate.) Mauss kept some letters from Dumézil, and a few to him. Pelliot has a few letters from Aurel Stein, though copies are also in the various Stein archives; and a useful one from Benveniste.
At the Archives Nationales I looked at some restricted things for which I had previously applied for permission or exemptions from restrictions, mainly teaching administrative records. While these records can be quite dry, they are also potentially useful for dates of positions, periods of absence and sometimes clarification of the courses taught. In particular there is some useful information in the file about Dumézil’s teaching of Armenian at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales vivantes. But one file which claims to be about Emile Benveniste is actually, I think, about Adrien Benveniste – who I don’t think is a relation.There were also some things in private collections. One of these was a lecture by Benveniste with an introduction and response by Lacan, which had been kindly shared with me before, but there was a letter here too. These files were interesting and mostly useful, though I know that on future visits I really need to give as much time to the main Benveniste archive as possible, rather than continuing to follow up some of these more peripheral lines of inquiry.
I am off to Switzerland for a few days in June, for an initial look at archives in Geneva and Fribourg. I hope I will be able to go back later to visit some other archives, mainly in Berne, and possibly return to these ones. But a short initial trip should give a better indication of how much time I will need. It’s almost five years since I was last in Switzerland, doing some research for the Foucault project. The archivists I’ve contacted have been very helpful, with one alerting me to a relevant file in a different archive.
So, a lot of different things this month. But apart for the short trip to Switzerland, June really has to be with a concentration on the Dumézil chapter and, hopefully, its complete draft.
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.
