Pierre-Henri Stanislas d'Escayrac de Lauture

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pierre-Henri Stanislas d'Escayrac de Lauture on a drawing from 1862

Pierre-Henri Stanislas Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture (born March 19, 1826 in Paris , † December 18, 1868 , in Fontainebleau ) was a French diplomat, Africa explorer and writer. His most famous work Le Desert et le Soudan served Karl May as a template for the travel narratives.

Life

Stanislas d'Escayrac Lauture came from an old noble family from Quercy . He attended the Collège de Juilly and then entered the diplomatic service. His first trip took him to Madagascar , the Comoros and Zanzibar in 1844 . On his return in 1846 he became an attaché at the French embassy in Lisbon and visited Algeria and Morocco from there.

After the revolution of 1848 he left the civil service and set off on journeys: first to England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy, then to Africa again in 1849. From Tunis he went on an expedition that took him to Kordofan and Sannar . He returned to Egypt via Khartoum and Sawakin . He published his travelogue under the title Le désert et le Soudan .

In 1852 he toured Syria and Palestine. In the same year he received the Cross of the Legion of Honor , in 1856 he became an officer. D'Escayrac was a member of the Société de Géographie and the Société asiatique and spoke several languages: Spanish, Portuguese and English since his youth, as well as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In 1854 he went to Egypt again and devoted himself to studying the languages ​​and dialects of the Arab and black population groups.

In 1856 the Viceroy of Egypt Muhammad Said appointed him at the suggestion of Ferdinand de Lessep to head a large-scale international expedition to explore the sources of the Nile . The khedive provided the twelve members with an escort three hundred men, two steamers, numerous barges and thirty-eight wagons, but the operation did not materialize despite months of preparation.

In 1860, d'Escayrac traveled to China as chairman of a scientific commission and accompanied the troops of a Franco-English expeditionary force during the Second Opium War . A diplomatic mission he was part of was captured en route to peace negotiations and taken to Beijing . Some Europeans, including d'Escayrac, were released. When it was found that the prisoners had been tortured and twenty men (seven French and thirteen English) killed, the English High Commissioner for China, Lord Elgin , ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. The French general Montauban, however, refused to allow his troops to participate in this retaliation.

After signing the Beijing Convention in October 1860, d'Escayrac returned to France in bad health. He was appointed commander of the Legion of Honor, lived mostly in Italy for the last few years of his life and died on December 18, 1868 at the age of forty-two.

Le Désert et le Soudan

Le Désert et le Soudan (1853) is the only work by d'Escayrac that has also appeared in a German translation. It was published by Karl Andree in a shortened version under the title The African Desert and the Land of Blacks on the Upper Nile in 1855 in the Carl B. Lorck publishing house in Leipzig. It is a comprehensive geographic , ethnographic, and political representation of the Sahara and Sudan .

Karl Andree describes d'Escayrac in the preface as “free of popular or ecclesiastical prejudices. [...] he lived with the inhabitants of the desert and the Nile countries like an Arab or a Nuba. [...] He does not look at Mohammedanism in Africa through a European-colored glass. "

The African desert and the land of the blacks on the Upper Nile with its detailed ethnographic and geographical descriptions served Karl May as a template for his own fictional travelogues; it formed “[…], as it were, May's handbook and travel guide for the Sahara and parts of North Africa.” May also used the book as an Arabic phrasebook and as a source for his descriptions of customs and traditions. In some cases he took over entire passages of text with only minor changes.

Works

  • Notice sur le Kordofan (1851)
  • Le désert et le Soudan (1853) (Eng. The African desert and the land of the blacks on the Upper Nile)
  • Mémoire sur le Ragle, ou Hallucination du Désert (1855)
  • Mémoire sur le Soudan (1856)
  • Considérations sur le passé et l'avenir de la Chine (1862)
  • Mémoires sur la Chine (1864)
  • Le langage, son histoire, ses lois, applications utiles de ces lois (1865)
  • La guerre, l'organization de l'armée et l'équité (1867)

literature

  • Victor-Adolphe Malte-Brun: Notice sur les voyages et les travaux de M. le Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Bulletin de la Société de geographie, janvier à juin 1869, 5e série, t.XVII . Paris 1869, p. 168–184 ( gallica.bnf.fr [accessed December 15, 2010]).
  • Paul Durand-Lapie: Le Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture: Voyageur et explorateur francais. Commandeur de la Legion d'honneur. Sa vie et ses ouvrages . Honoré Champion, Paris 1899 ( gallica.bnf.fr [accessed May 1, 2020]).
  • August Petermann u. a .: Count d'Escayrac Lauture's expedition . The phantom of the source of the Nile. In: Communications from Justus Perthes' Geographical Institute . tape 2 . Gotha 1856, p. 342–346 ( digitized 55.7 MB in Google Book Search [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  • The war against China in 1860 . Verlag der Dyk'schen Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1865, p. 83– ( digitized from Google Book Search [accessed December 15, 2010]).
  • Graf d'Escayrac de Lauture: The African desert and the land of the blacks on the Upper Nile . Verlag von G. Seuf's Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1867 ( digitized from Google Book Search [accessed on December 21, 2010]).
  • Helmut Lieblang: "See this Darb, Sihdi ..." Karl May on the trail of Count d'Escayrac de Lauture. In: Claus Roxin, Helmut Schmiedt, Hans Wollschläger (Hrsg.): Yearbook of the Karl May Society 1996 . Hansa Verlag, Husum 1996, ISBN 3-920421-70-1 , pp. 132-204. ( Online version )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Victor-Adolphe Malte-Brun: Notice sur les voyages et les travaux de M. le Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Bulletin de la Société de geographie, janvier à juin 1869, 5e série, t.XVII . Paris 1869, p. 169 ( gallica.bnf.fr [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  2. ^ According to Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon * December 6, 1830; † December 20, 1868.
  3. ^ Victor-Adolphe Malte-Brun: Notice sur les voyages et les travaux de M. le Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Bulletin de la Société de geographie, janvier à juin 1869, 5e série, t.XVII . Paris 1869, p. 170 ( gallica.bnf.fr [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  4. ^ Victor-Adolphe Malte-Brun: Notice sur les voyages et les travaux de M. le Comte d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Bulletin de la Société de geographie, janvier à juin 1869, 5e série, t.XVII . Paris 1869, p. 173 ( gallica.bnf.fr [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  5. ↑ August Petermann u. a .: Count d'Escayrac Lauture's expedition . The phantom of the source of the Nile. In: Communications from Justus Perthes' Geographical Institute . tape 2 . Gotha 1856, p. 342–346 ( digitized in Google Book Search [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  6. ^ The war against China in 1860 . Verlag der Dyk'schen Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1865, p. 83 ( digitized from Google Book Search [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  7. ^ The war against China in 1860 . Verlag der Dyk'schen Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1865, p. 106 ( digitized from Google Book Search [accessed December 21, 2010]).
  8. ↑ Count d'Escayrac de Lauture: The African desert and the land of the blacks on the upper Nile . Published by G. Seuf's Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1867, p. VII ( digitized version in Google book search [accessed on December 21, 2010]).
  9. ↑ Helmut Lieblang: "See this Darb, Sihdi ...", Karl May on the trail of Count d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Yearbook of the Karl May Society 1996 . S. 139 ( karl-may-gesellschaft.de [accessed on December 21, 2010]).
  10. ↑ Helmut Lieblang: "See this Darb, Sihdi ...", Karl May on the trail of Count d'Escayrac de Lauture . In: Yearbook of the Karl May Society 1996 . S. 137–189 ( karl-may-gesellschaft.de [accessed December 21, 2010]).
personal data
SURNAME Lauture, Pierre-Henri Stanislas d'Escayrac de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lauture, Pierre-Henri Stanislas d'Escayrac de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French explorer of Africa
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH December 18, 1868
Place of death Fontainebleau