Francisque Michel

Francisque Michel (born February 19, 1809 in Lyon , † May 18, 1887 in Paris ) was a French historian, Romanist, Medievalist, Argot researcher and bibliophile.

life and work

Michel graduated from high school in Paris in 1830 and began studying at the Ecole des Chartes, but he was not made for a regular career. In contact with Charles Nodier (librarian of the Arsenal library), François-Juste-Marie Raynouard , Jean-Baptiste-Bonaventure de Roquefort, Louis Monmerqué and Pierre-Claude Daunou - he was a passionate and unique digger in the archives and manuscript departments of the Libraries from which, with romantic enthusiasm, he brought hundreds of dusty medieval treasures into daylight and published them.

When he realized that many of these treasures were stored in England, he had Minister François Guizot send him on an official mission to London to the British Museum in 1833 , as well as to Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1835 he discovered the Roland song , the original text of French literature Also first published in 1837 ( La chanson de Roland ou de Roncevaux, du XIIe siècle, publiée pour la première fois d'après le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Bodléienne à Oxford , Paris 1837, Paris 1869, Geneva 1974, Paris 1975). In the same year he was appointed by Education Minister Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy a member of the Comité de l'histoire et des positive chroniques, chartes et inscriptions made the chaired by Silvestre de Sacy nor Joseph Naudet (1787-1878), Benjamin Guérard ( 1797–1854), Jacques-Joseph Champollion and Jules Desnoyers . In 1838 he was made Knight of the Legion of Honor and, who only had to show his Abitur certificate, was given a (newly created) professorship for foreign literature in Bordeaux in 1839, which, however, amounted to a kind of exile. In 1846 he completed his habilitation in Paris with the two Thèses Quae vices quaeque mutationes et Virgilium ipsum et ejus carmina per mediam aetatem exceperint explanare tentavit Franciscus Michel (Paris 1846) and Histoire des races maudites de la France et de l'Espagne (2 volumes. Paris 1847, Monein 2008).

From 1850 onwards, Michel distinguished himself primarily through original commercial history research, through books on the Basque Country and Scotland, as well as through research on the Argot and a French Argot dictionary. He has also published translations of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Sterne and Tennyson.

Michel was a corresponding member of the Institut de France, as well as the academies in Vienna and Turin. On the title page of his Etudes de philologie comparée sur l'argot he calls himself a Doctor of the University of Marburg (the Romance studies there was Adolf Ebert ).

If, as a result, he was not denied recognition, there was still an unmistakable reserve on the part of official French Romance studies, which is expressed, for example, in a review of his edition of the Rosenromans by Paul Meyer (see literature below). Meyer misses any historical-critical method, collation of text variants, etc. and instead finds that Michel has simply added a few irrelevant and some incorrect information to an edition that has existed since 1814 and that the versification is also largely incorrect. His final judgment is (p. 179):

«Quand on a, comme M. Fr. Michel, l'honneur d'avoir été l'un des premiers et des plus actifs parmi ceux qui ont travaillé à mettre en lumière notre ancienne littérature, on devrait s'abstenir de rien produire plutôt que de compromettre son nom par des publications à tout le moins bien peu dignes d'estime »

Other works

• Examen critique de la dissertation de M. Henri Monin sur le Roman de Ronceveaux, Paris 1832
• Bibliothèque anglo-saxonne, Paris 1838
• Reports to M. le ministre de l'Instruction publique sur les anciens monuments de l'histoire et de la littérature de la France qui se trouvent dans les bibliothèques de l'Angleterre et de l'Écosse, Paris 1839
• Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d'Angleterre, Paris 1840
• Le roman du Saint [de Robert de Borron], publié pour la première fois d'apres un ms. de la Bibliothèque royale, Bordeaux 1841
• (together with Edouard Fournier) La grande bohême, histoire des royaumes d'Argot et de Thunes, du duché d'Égypte, suivie d'un dictionnaire complet des diverse langues fourbesques et argotiques de l'Europe à toutes les époques, 2 vols. , Paris 1850
• (together with Édouard Fournier) Histoire des hôtelleries, cabarets, hôtels garnis, restaurants et cafés, et des anciennes communautés et confreries d'hôteliers, de marchands de vins, de restaurateurs, de limonadiers, etc., Paris 1851-1854
• Recherches sur le commerce, la fabrication et l'usage des étoffes de soie, d'or et d'argent et autres tissus précieux en Occident, principalement en France, pendant le moyen âge, Paris 1852-1854, Amsterdam 2001
• Études de philologie comparée sur l'argot et sur les idiomes analogues parlés en Europe et en Asie, Paris 1856 (contains, inter alia, a four-hundred-page Argot dictionary of French)
• Le Pays basque, sa population, sa langue, ses moeurs, sa littérature et sa musique, Paris 1857, Donostia 1998
• Les Écossais en France et les Français en Écosse, London 1862
• Le Roman de la Rose, republished, Paris 1864
• Histoire du commerce et de la navigation à Bordeaux, 1867-1871, Pau 2005
• A critical inquiry into the Scottish language with the view of illustrating the rise and progress of civilization in Scotland, Edinburgh / London 1882

literature

• Prosper Mérimée, Lettres à Francisque Michel 1848-1870; Journal de Prosper Mérimée 1860-1868, texte établi et annoté, avec une introduction par Pierre Trahard , Paris 1930 (Oeuvres complètes de Prosper Mérimée 7)
• Paul Meyer: Review of Le Roman de la Rose, new ed. by Francisque Michel, Paris 1864, in: Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 26, 1865, pp. 177–179
• William Roach: Francisque Michel: a pioneer in medieval studies, in: Proceedings of the American philosophical Society 114, 1970, pp. 168-178
• Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle , sv
• Philippe de Saint-Gérand: La Critical Inquiry into the Scottish Language ... (1872-1882) de Francisque Michel: histoire, philologie et fantaisie, in: Bibliothèque des Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 75, 1994, p. 321-347
• William Cole, First and Otherwise Notable Editions of Medieval French Texts Printed from 1742 to 1874: A Bibliographical Catalog of My Collection , Sitges 2005.
• Didier Barrière, “Un Petit Francisque Michel”, Médiéviste, Bibliomane Romantique, Mauvais élève de Charles Nodier, in: Fragmentos 31, 2006, pp. 113–140

Web links

• http://www.languefrancaise.net/Argot/Michel1856