Claude Fauriel

Claude Fauriel

Charles-Claude Fauriel (born October 21, 1772 in Saint-Étienne ; died July 15, 1844 in Paris ) was a French philologist .

Life

Fauriel received his first training in schools of the oratorians , first in Tournon , then in Lyon . During the revolution he was a soldier in the army of the Western Pyrenees under Dugommier , whom he also served as secretary. In 1799, shortly before the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire , he became secretary to the police minister Joseph Fouché , but soon resigned and lived afterwards on his country estate La Maisonnette. However, he continued to move in literary circles and was a frequent guest in the salons of Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant . He devoted himself to the study of history, the older languages ​​and literature. He learned Arabic and Sanskrit, translated Jens Immanuel Baggesen's Parthenais from Danish in 1810, and was in frequent correspondence with writers all over Europe. His correspondence with Alessandro Manzoni , with whom he lived in Italy from 1823–1826 and whose dramas he translated into French, was particularly fruitful .

In 1830 Fauriel became the first professor for "foreign literatures" at the Faculté des lettres de Paris of the Sorbonne . In 1832 he was appointed one of the curators of the manuscript department of the royal library, and in 1836 he was accepted into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . He was also a member of François Guizot's historical committee and took part in the Histoire littéraire de la France, which was started by the Benedictines . From 1834 he was a corresponding member of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence .

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Fauriel is considered a pioneer of comparative literary studies in France and, alongside Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, the founder of the romantic paradigm in French literary historiography , which only began to challenge the prevailing neoclassical ideals a few decades after the revolution. This break manifested itself above all in the turn to the Middle Ages, which was widespread in Romanticism, to which Fauriel also dedicated a large part of his work, and the appreciation of folk poetry over art poetry.

This became clear in its first publication, a collection and translation of modern Greek folk songs. It was the first work of this kind ( Werner von Haxthausen's collection, which had already been started, did not appear in print until 1935) and made a significant contribution to the philhellenic movement to which not a few of the European romantics dedicated themselves. To this day, it represents an important basic work of Neo-Greek Studies, even if later philologists Fauriel's methodological and linguistic expertise often questioned. Fauriel never set foot on Greek soil, but relied on the memories and records of Greek exiles in Italy. The collection was also very well received internationally; translations of the collection into German (provided by Wilhelm Müller ), English and Russian were published in 1825 . In the foreword, Fauriel expresses his conviction, following on from Herder's idea of ​​the “ folk spirit ”, that the Greek folk poetry shows the “direct and true expression of the national character and spirit” of the Greeks, and claims a continuity of this folk poetry with the ancient Greek epics.

After his appointment as professor for foreign literatures, Fauriel devoted himself particularly to European literature of the Middle Ages. The lectures on Provencal poetry (1831–1833) and Dante Alighieri (1833–1835) only appeared posthumously in print, but had a great impact among his students, such as Jean-Jacques Ampère . In the Histoire de la poésie provençale he advocates the thesis that not only French but all European literature goes back to Provencal literature of the Middle Ages. He suspects that the trobador poetry is an enormous corpus of an older, but not handed down tradition of primitive folk poetry, in which a new Christian worldview found form and expression for the first time. Fauriel tried to find traces of this tradition, which was passed down mainly orally, in the European literature of the Middle Ages, which, however, had moved further and further away from these origins due to an increasing artificiality. René Wellek compares Fauriel's endeavors to outline this Provencal substratum with the contemporary endeavors of historical linguistics to reconstruct the Indo-European original language . Fauriel traced the tradition of the heroic song and courtly poetry in both northern France and Germany back to a Provencal origin, as did forms of Italian or Spanish folk and later art poetry such as the day song , the ballad or the pastoral . The Germanic influence (as claimed by the Brothers Grimm and other German Romantics) was negligible overall, as was the Celtic and Arabic. However, the methods of Fauriel's attempts at reconstruction are often daring, at least from a philological point of view. His thesis of a Provencal model for the Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach is based solely on the references contained therein to a trobador named 'Kyot', for whose existence, however, there is no evidence based on current knowledge.

Even with Dante ( Dante et les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes , printed 1854) he believes he can prove the Provencal influence. The two-volume work also offers a detailed overview of the political circumstances surrounding the emergence of Dante's works and a (now obsolete) outline of the historical development of the Italian language. His concern, however, is not only the historicization of the work, but also the representation of Dante's ingenious creative power.

Works (selection)

As an author

• Chants popular de la Grèce modern. 2 volumes. Firmin Didot, Paris 1824-25. (Digital copies: Volume I ; Volume II )
• Histoire de la Gaule méridionale sous la domination des conquérants germains . 4 volumes. Paulin, Paris 1836. (Digital copies: Volumes I ; II ; III ; IV )
• De l'origine de l'épopée chevaleresque du moyen age . Auguste Auffary, Paris 1832. ( digitized version )
• Histoire de la croisade against the herétiques albigeois . Imprimerie Royale, Paris 1837. ( digitized version )
• Histoire de la poésie provençale . 3 volumes. Jules Labitte, Paris 1846. (Digital copies: Volumes I ; II ; III )
• Dante et les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes . 2 volumes. Auguste Durand, Paris 1854. (Digital copies: Volumes I ; II )
• Les derniers jours du consulat . Edited by Ludovic Lalanne. Calmann Lévy, Paris 1886. ( digitized version )

As translator

• Jens Immanuel Baggesen : Parthenais . 1810.
• Alessandro Manzoni : Tragedies . 1823.

Secondary literature

• Stavros Deligiorgis: Fauriel and Modern Greek Poetry. In: PMLA 84: 1, 1969.
• Michel Despland: Un tournant vers l'herméneutique en France en 1806? In: Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 23: 1, 1994.
• Michel Espagne: Le paradigme de l'étranger: Les chaires de littérature étrangère au XIXe siècle. Le Cerf, Paris 1993. ISBN 2-204-04739-2
• Michel Espagne: Claude Fauriel en quête d'une méthode, ou l'Idéologie à l'écoute de l'Allemagne . In: Romantisme 73, 1991.
• Jean-Baptiste Galley: Claude Fauriel, membre de l'Institut (1772–1843). A. Champion, Paris 1909.
• Michael Glencross: Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition. Boydell & Brewer, Cambridge 1995.
• Miodrag Ibrovac: Claude Fauriel et la fortune européenne des poésies populaires grècque et serbe, étude d'histoire romantique . Didier, Paris 1966.
• Αλέξης Πολίτης (Ed.): Κατάλοιπα Fauriel και Brunet de Presle . 1: Τα "νεοελληνικά" του Claude Fauriel ; 2: Η Συλλογή τραγουδιών του W. Brunet de Presle : αναλυτικός κατάλογος . Κέντρο Νεοελληνικών Ερευνών Ε.Ι.Ε., Athens 1980.
• Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve : Portraits contemporains . Vol. IV. Michel Lévy Frères, Paris 1869. pp. 125-268.
• Brigitte Sgoff: Claude Fauriel and the beginnings of Romance linguistics . Unpublished dissertation, Munich 1994.
• René Wellek : History of literary criticism. Vol. 2. DeGruyter, Berlin and New York 1977–1990. Pp. 5-8.

Web links

• Literature by and about Claude Fauriel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Membership list of the Crusca
2. ↑ Gunnar Hering : The Greek War of Independence and Philhellenism. In: Alfred Noe (ed.): The Philhellenism in Western European Literature 1780-1830. Rodopi 1994. [= International Research on General and Comparative Literature, Vol. 6] pp. 63-64.
3. ↑ Deligiorgis, pp. 9-10.
4. ↑ Wellek, p. 7.
5. ↑ Wellek, pp. 7–8.