Paul Soleillet

Paul Soleillet (born April 29, 1842 in Nîmes , † September 10, 1886 in Aden ) was a French adventurer and traveler to Africa .

Soleillet toured Algeria , Tunisia and Tripolitania in 1865/1866 , then crossed the Algerian Sahara in 1871 and was one of the best-known advocates of the trans-Saharan railway . In 1873 he undertook on behalf of the Chambers of Commerce of Marseilles and Algiers, a trip to Tuat on a by Europeans not yet committed route, but allowed the oases themselves do not enter and returned in 1874 to France, where he was a zealous propagandist of increased expansion of the French colonial empire in entered the Sahara.

In 1878 Soleillet traveled via Senegambia to Ségou on the Niger and after his return tried in 1879 on behalf of the French government under President Jules Grévy to penetrate from St. Louis to Timbuktu , but was plundered at Schingit at the instigation of the French governor and was back in May 1880 Paris. In July of the same year he tried again in vain to get to Timbuktu from St. Louis.

On behalf of a French trading company in Obok , Soleillet led a small expedition over the Shoah to Kaffa in 1882 and wanted to go to the Shoah again when he died on September 10, 1886 at the age of 44 in Aden.

Soleillet's importance as an African explorer was greatly overestimated in the 19th century. He had good relations with the colonial-friendly press, which at times hyped him to be a kind of French Stanley . In fact, despite the grandiose title of his first book (transl .: Exploring the Sahara ), he did nothing to expand knowledge of the Sahara. It even seems that certain passages of his travel descriptions are not based on his own perception, but on the imaginative reformulation of reports from previous travelers or on the reports collected by caravan drivers. His claim that he reached the Adrar region in the border area between present-day Mauritania and the north of present-day Mali , i.e. only “a few” days' journey from Timbuktu, is apparently not based on facts. In any case, the creation of the French colony Obok on the Gulf of Aden is due to him.

Works

• Exploration du Sahara (1876)
• L'avenir de la France en Afrique (1876)
• L'Afrique occidentale (1877)
• Les voyages et découvertes de Paul Soleillet, etc .. Racontés par lui-même (1881)
• Voyage en Ethiopie 1882–1884 (1886)
• Obock, le Choa, le Kaffa (1886)
• Voyage a Ségou 1878–79 (with Gabriel Gravier , 1887)

literature

• Jules Gros: Les voyages et d´couvertes de Paul Soleillet dans le Sahara et dans le voyage en Soudan . Tallandier, Paris 1881

This article is based on a text in the public domain from Meyers Konversations-Lexikon , 4th edition from 1888 to 1890.

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