Pierre Pigneau de Behaine

Pierre Pigneau de Behaine (born November 2, 1741 in Origny-en-Thiérache , † October 9, 1799 in Quy Nhơn ) was a French Roman Catholic Vietnamese missionary , bishop, mandarin and lexicographer.

life and work

Origin and education

Pierre-Joseph-Georges Pigneau de Behaine (also: Pigneaux de Béhaine) grew up in today's Aisne department between Hirson and Vervins (birthplace of world traveler Marc Lescarbot ) in a middle-class environment. He had eleven siblings (including two priests and four nuns). He attended the Jesuit college in Laon (birthplace of the missionary Jacques Marquette ), the seminary in Paris (34 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève ) and joined the Paris Mission . She sent the 24-year-old priest to the Asia mission.

The missionary to Asia 1765–1775

Pigneau left Lorient in December 1765 and traveled via Pondichéry (June 1766), Madras , Malacca and Macau to Hà Tiên (province of Kiên Giang , opposite the island of Phú Quốc ) in Cochinchina (now in Vietnam ), where he arrived in March 1767. Bishop Guillaume Piguel (1722–1771) of the Qui Nhơn diocese immediately made him head of the seminary in Hòn Đất. In the context of the difficult political situation, he spent several months in prison (some with a wooden collar ), but was released again. In view of the growing hostility, the seminary had to be evacuated at the end of 1769 and could only be reopened in Virampatnam near Pondychéry in 1771. There he was appointed in 1772 as the successor of the late Bishop Piguel as Apostolic Vicar and Titular Bishop of Adraa (French: Adran). He was only able to return to Hà Tiên in 1775.

Advisor to King Nguyễn Phúc Ánh 1776–1784

In 1776 Pigneaux met the 14-year-old Prince Nguyễn Phúc Ánh , later founder of the Nguyễn dynasty , and did not side with the north in the war between North and South Vietnam, which lasted from 1770 to 1802, although the goodwill of the local Tây- Sơn dynasty compared to the Christian mission was considerable, but to the south. When Nguyễn Phúc Ánh gave himself the title of king in 1780, Pigneau became a widely respected advisor who was revered by the king as a “great master” and was indispensable to him in the warfare against the Tây-Sơn.

Travel to Versailles and back 1784–1789

Looking for Western support for Phúc Ánh, Pigneaux went in 1784, accompanied by the Hereditary Prince Nguyễn Phúc Cảnh (1780–1801) and his entourage to Pondichéry (arrival February 1785), from where they embarked for France in July 1786 (arrival February 1787). Pigneau reached with Chancellor Loménie de Brienne in November 1787 the conclusion of an assistance contract between Louis XVI. and King Phúc Ánh ( Traité de Versailles de 1787 ), who of course had no consequences for the time being because of the financial hardship of the French state and the revolution that broke out and only became a pretext for French colonial policy in Indochina in the 19th century. Pigneau and Prince Canh left France in December 1787 and sailed back to Cochinchina via Pondichéry, where they arrived in July 1789.

The unofficial Minister of War 1789–1799

Pigneau took his place again at the side of Phúc Ánh, received the official title of tutor to the Hereditary Prince, but was in fact the strong man at court until his death in 1799 and, in the ongoing war against the Tây-Sơn, the decisive one Strategist. He procured Western officers as military advisers and guides, had a fleet built based on the Western model, built fortifications in the style of Vauban and, since France failed to help, he did not shy away from using large amounts of its own funds to buy weapons and ammunition. He was supported in this by a small group of compatriots, especially Olivier de Puymanel (1768–1799) and Jean-Marie Dayot (1760–1809), who, together with his brother, created a map of the coasts of Indochina. The French did not act as patriots (as people thought in the 19th century), but in their own interests, since political developments in France prevented them from returning.

Role of mission

Pigneau's real task, the mission, was increasingly being neglected by the constant waging of war. It was not even mentioned in the Versailles Treaty. While the Hereditary Prince had to learn again after returning from France to put his Christian orientation behind the state welfare, Pigneau's employer Phúc Ánh was considered an atheist. In 1797, for which figures are available, the situation was as follows: Pigneau waged war for a country with 25,000 Christians against a country with 40,000 Christians. The missionaries on the opposing side expressed themselves negatively about his activities.

Pigneau's conception of mission

Pigneau was a staunch advocate of inculturation . As an intellectual who had developed the entire linguistic and cultural background of the Sino-Vietnamese culture, he was aware that some European norms regarding liturgy and spiritual clothing in Asia were perceived as ridiculous. With the Vatican, which he accused of Europe-centered thinking, he was therefore permanently in dispute, a kind of new edition of the ritual dispute between the Jesuits and the Pope in the 17th century. The same applies to the directors of the Paris Mission, who never left France themselves.

The lexicographer

As a means of rapprochement, especially with the local elite, Pigneau tried hard from the beginning to gain knowledge of Chinese and Vietnamese. In Virampatnam he created a dictionary that is to be honored as part of the Vietnamese lexicography history.

The beginnings of Vietnamese lexicography

With the writing system developed by the Portuguese Francisco de Pina (1585–1625) for writing Vietnamese (based on Latin letters with diacritical marks), Gaspar do Amaral (1594–1646) for Vietnamese-Portuguese and António Barbosa (1594–1647) for Portuguese-Vietnamese (now lost) dictionaries that the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1593–1660) used for his trilingual dictionary Dictionarium annamiticum lusitanicum et latinum , published in Rome in 1651 .

Pigneau's dictionary

This dictionary was before Pigneau when, with the help of eight native speakers , he compiled his two-column Dictionarium Anamitico Latinum from September 1772 to June 1773 , which used two Vietnamese scripts, the Latin ( Quốc Ngữ ) and, to the left of it, the Chinese ( Hán Nôm ). The dictionary was not printed during his lifetime. It was not until 1999 that the copy was printed in Saigon .

Effect of his dictionary

Pigneau's unprinted dictionary was the main source for the Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, primitus inceptum ab illustrissimo PJ Pigneaux (facsimile print Paris 2001), published in 1838 by Jean-Louis Taberd (1794–1840) , and went from there to that of Joseph-Simon Theurel (1829– 1868) wrote a Dictionarium anamitico-latinum , which was only published posthumously in 1877 , from where it still had a considerable effect on the two-volume Dictionnaire annamite of 1895, which Paulus Huình Tịnh Của (1834–1907) published in Saigon.

Death and honors

When Pigneau died in the middle of the war at the age of almost 58, he was buried in his Vietnamese clothing on December 16, 1799 at his own request. 40,000 people, 120 elephants and a king in tears accompanied the coffin to the mausoleum five kilometers from Saigon (destroyed in 1983). In 1902 a monument was erected to him in front of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Saigon (destroyed between 1960 and 1970) showing him with Prince Canh, holding up the Treaty of Versailles in his right hand. On May 11, 1914, a museum was opened in the house where he was born in Origny-en-Thiérache (has been owned by the municipality since 1953, visits by appointment).

Works

• Tự vị Annam Latinh, 1772–1773 = Dictionarium anamitico latinum, 1772–1773. Nhà xuá̂t bản Trẻ, TP. Hò̂ Chí Minh 1999.
• Grand Cathéchisme cochinchinois. 1782. (60 pages, Chinese).

literature

• Elisabeth Arnoulx de Pirey: Il en viendra de l'Orient et de l'Occident. Essai biographique sur quelques prêtres envoyés en Extrême-Orient par les Missions étrangères de Paris . Téqui, Paris 2001.
• Claude Lange and Jean Charbonnier: L'Eglise catholique et la société des Missions étrangères au Vietnam. Vicariat apostolique de Cochinchine, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles . L'Harmattan, Paris 2005.
• Frédéric Mantienne (* 1953): Pierre Pigneaux. Evêque d'Adran et mandarin de Cochinchine (1741–1799) . Les Indes savantes, Paris 2012. (main source of this post)
  • (earlier version) Mgr Pierre Pigneaux, évêque d'Adran, dignitaire de Cochinchine . Églises d'Asie, Paris 1999.
• Dinh-Hoa Nguyen: "Vietnamese Lexicography". In: Dictionaries. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. An international handbook on lexicography. Third partial volume. ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann , Oskar Reichmann , Herbert Ernst Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta , Berlin. New York 1991, pp. 2583-2589.

Web links

• Information on Pierre Pigneau de Behaine in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
• Literature by and about Pierre Pigneau de Behaine in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Personnel entry on the homepage of the Catholic hierarchy
• History of the museum in Origny , French
• Illustrated life story , French