Jacqueline de Romilly

Jacqueline de Romilly
Born	(1913-03-26)26 March 1913 Chartres, France
Died	Boulogne-Billancourt, France
Nationality	French
Education	Lycée Louis-le-Grand
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure
Occupation	Writer Teacher
Known for	Member of the Académie française

Jacqueline Worms de Romilly (French: [ʁɔmiji]; née David, 26 March 1913 – 18 December 2010) was a Franco-Greek philologist, classical scholar and fiction writer. Because she was of Jewish ancestry, the Vichy government suspended her from her teaching duties during the Occupation of France. She was the first woman nominated to the Collège de France, and in 1988, the second woman to enter the Académie française. She was also known for her work on the culture and language of ancient Greece, and in particular on Thucydides.

Biography

Born in Chartres, Eure-et-Loir, she studied at the Lycée Molière, where she won the Concours général in Latin and took second prize in Ancient Greek in 1930. She then prepared for the École Normale Supérieure at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. She entered the class of 1933 of the ENS Ulm. She passed the agrégation in Classics in 1936, and became a doctor of letters in 1947.

After being a schoolteacher, she became a professor at Lille University and subsequently at the Sorbonne, between 1957 and 1973. She later was promoted to the chair of Greek and the development of moral and political thought at the Collège de France — the first woman nominated to this prestigious institution. In 1988, she was the second woman (after Marguerite Yourcenar) to enter the Académie française, being elected to Chair #7, which was previously occupied by André Roussin.

In 1995, she obtained Greek nationality and in 2000 was named as an Ambassador of Hellenism by the Greek government. A one-time president of the Association Guillaume Budé, she remained an honorary president until her death at a hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt at the age of 97.

After having only received baptism in 1940, she fully converted to Maronite Catholicism in 2008, aged 95.

Honours and awards

• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour (2007)
• Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite
• Commander of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques
• Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• Commander of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece)
• Commander of the Order of Honour (Greece)
• Elected to the Académie française (24 November 24, 1988)
• First woman professor at the Collège de France (Chair: Greece and the formation of the moral and political thought)
• First woman member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1975)
• President of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres (1987)
• Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1981)
• Appointed by Greece as Ambassador of Hellenism (which it receives citizenship in 1995)(2000)
• Ambatielos Prize of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1948)
• Croiset Prize of the Institut de France (1969)
• Langlois Prize of the Académie française (1974)
• Grand Prize of the Académie française (1984
• Onassis Prize (Athens, 1995)
• Daudet Prize for defence of the French language (2000)
• Prize of the Greek Parliament (2008)
• Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988)
• Corresponding member of foreign academies: Denmark, Great Britain, Vienna, Athens, Bavaria, the Netherlands, Naples, Turin, Genoa and the United States.
• Honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Athens, Dublin, Heidelberg, Montreal and Yale University

External links

• L'Académie française (French)