Paul Mus

Paul Mus (born June 1, 1902 in Bourges , † August 9, 1969 in Murs ) was a French historian specializing in the history and culture of Southeast Asia, especially Buddhism there .

Origin and beginnings of his career

Mus was the son of a school teacher for English in Bourges and (from 1907) in Hanoi and grew up in Vietnam. His grandfather was a simple worker from the Vaucluse department . He attended the Lycée Henri IV , where he was a student of Alain (his godfather). In 1922 he received his licentiate in philosophy. He studied at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) and Siamese at the École des Langues Orientales. His teachers included Marcel Mauss , Marcel Granet and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl , Jules Bloch and Sylvain Lévi . He married in 1924 and, after completing his military service, went to Hanoi for the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in 1927 . He visited Bali , Borobodur and Angkor Wat and studied Buddhism and the Cham culture. In 1931 he became a permanent member of EFEO, of which he was librarian and secretary (at times also interim director). In 1935 he was on a sabbatical in Europe in Oxford and Paris and became Directeur d'etudes at EPHE, where he taught the history of Indian religions. In 1938 he received his doctorate (Doctorat ès lettres, La lumière sur les six voies ) and then returned to Hanoi.

Second World War

During the Second World War, he volunteered in the French army, was a machine gunner in retreat on the Loire in 1940 as an officer in a Senegalese battalion and then taught under the Vichy regime in Dakar and Togo . In 1943 he joined the Forces françaises libres of Charles de Gaulle and received training in Algeria and with the British (SOE) in India for intended commandos and underground operations in Indochina against the Japanese. In Vietnam at that time the Japanese still shared power with the French administration of the Vichy regime and did not remove the French colonial administration until March 1945. De Gaulle tried to organize a French resistance on the one hand, but also wanted to keep the colonial rule in Vietnam, which was a tightrope walk at the time, since the US President Roosevelt was strictly against it. Mus cooperated with de Gaulle's East Asia envoy Francois Giron de Langlade and advised him. On one occasion he was with him in London, where he narrowly escaped a V2 impact. He used the pseudonym Louis Caille for radio addresses in Vichy Vietnam. His on-site deployment in Vietnam was thwarted when the Japanese came to power. He was flown to India and jumped off again in Laos in April 1945 for a futile effort to persuade General Sabattier to continue fighting in Vietnam on de Gaulle's orders. De Gaulle named Major General Leclerc as his commander-in-chief in Southeast Asia and Mus was his advisor in Paris. He also accompanied the general during the Japanese surrender in September 1945 on the Missouri and was also briefly involved in the resumption of French colonial rule in Vietnam. For example, he met Ho Chi Minh in 1947 during a stay of several months as an advisor to the French High Commissioner Emile Bollaert. He described his impressions of Ho Chi Minh at the time in the US Oscar-nominated documentary In the year of the pig (1968, Emile de Antonio ) about the origins of the Vietnam War.

After the war

In 1946 he became head of the former administration college for colonial officials in Paris, now called École national de la France d'outre mer , which he remained until 1950, when his contract was probably not because of his known sympathies for the Viet Minh and as an opponent of the colonial war in Vietnam was renewed. From 1946 until his death he was professor of Far Eastern civilizations at the Collège de France . He was also from 1951 professor of civilization in Southeast Asia at Yale University . In 1963 he visited Japan. During the Vietnam War he stayed in the United States, where he felt like a guest, but passed on his knowledge of the country to students and journalists friends and gave lectures on the Vietnam War. In 1969 he suffered a stroke in New York. He died in his adopted home Murs , where he is buried like his son.

His most influential book is his analysis of the French involvement in Vietnam in 1952 (Vietnam, sociologie d'une guerre) and his main work Barabudur from 1934, the work that opened his university career at the renowned College de France.

His son Émile (* 1932) died as a paratrooper officer in the Algerian war in 1960, which hit him deeply. He published his letters after his death. A daughter Laurence Rimer was born in 1937.

Fonts

• Le Viet Nam chez lui, Paris: Center d'études de politique étrangère, 1946 (speech at the Sorbonne)
• Viêt-Nam, sociologie d´une guerre, Paris, Edition du Seuil, 1952
• L'Inde vue de l'Est: cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa, Hanoi 1934
  • English translation: India seen from the East: Indian and indigenous cults in Champa, Monash University Press 2011
• Barabudur, 2 volumes, Impr. D'Extrême-Orient, Hanoi. 1935, Reprint: New York, Arno Press 1978
  • English translation: Barabuḍur: sketch of a history of Buddhism based on archaeological criticism of the texts, Indira Gandhi National Center of the Arts, New Delhi, Sterling Publ. 1998
• Ho Chi Minh, l´Vietnam, l´Asie, Ed. du Seuil 1971
• Le destin de l'Union française de l'Indochine à l'Afrique, Paris: Ed. du Seuil 1954
• Guerre sans visage, lettres commentées du sous-lieutenant Émile Mus, Paris: du Seuil 1961
• with John T. McAlister The Vietnamese and their revolution , Harper and Row 1970
• L'angle de l'Asie, Paris: Hermann 1977 (edited by Serge Thion, with bibliography)

Web links

• Biography of David P. Chandler, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Volume 4, 2009, pp. 141-191, pdf