Jean Gaulmier

Jean Gaulmier (10 March 1905 – 11 November 1997) was a French orientalist who befriended Zaki al-Arsuzi, one of the principal founders of Ba'athism. Passionate about the East, which he aimed to bring closer to the West, Gaulmier was a noted specialist on Volney and Gobineau.

Biography

Jean Gaulmier was born in Charenton-du-Cher. After his secondary studies at the Collège Sainte-Croix in Neuilly (baccalauréat in Latin and Greek in 1920, Latin, sciences and philosophy in 1921) and a year devoted to mathematics (1922), he turned to literature, but failed to pass the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure (with Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan and Jean-Paul Sartre as companions) in 1925.

He then turned to the study of literature, philosophy and Greek at the Sorbonne. Étienne Gilson, his professor of philosophy, illuminated for him the whole filiation which, through the Arab philosophers, leads to Saint Thomas Aquinas, exegete of Aristotle.

Jean Gaulmier conceived the idea of learning Arabic. Gilson advised him to meet Louis Massignon, the first orientalist of his time. "Arabic," he told him, "is the language of God". So in 1925 he enrolled at the National School of Oriental Languages (ENLOV). His teacher was Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes and his friends were Syrians sent to Paris under the mandate: Zaki Arsouzi, Djamil Saliba, Kazem Daghestani.

In order to practice the language and stimulated by this growing interest, he decided to travel to Lebanon, where he enlisted for two years (1928) in the 17th regiment of Senegalese riflemen, whose depot was in Beirut.

Thus began a career, under the French mandate, in Lebanon and Syria which would keep him in the Orient for a quarter of a century. Eight months later, Jean Gaulmier was sent to Damascus with the title of "advisor for public instruction."

At the age of twenty-four, he was appointed director of French studies in Hama, where he wrote two volumes of short stories inspired by his native Berry: Terroir (1931) and Matricule 8 (1932), published by Rieder in the collection of "Contemporary French Writers" and praised by Louis Guilloux, Romain Rolland and André Demaison. His reputation as a writer was established in France.

In 1932, he was appointed to Damascus for two years; then in 1934 to Aleppo where he remained until 1939. During these thirteen years, he taught philosophy and inspected Syrian educational institutions. In 1939, Gaulmier was mobilized there. After being demobilized in 1941, he joined the Free French and provided information on what was happening in Aleppo before the Syrian campaign. He witnessed the passage of German planes sent to support the Iraqi campaign against the British.

Introduced to General de Gaulle during his visit to Aleppo, he was entrusted with the task of directing the information and broadcasting service of the Free French in Beirut until 19441 and published an Anthology of de Gaulle and General de Gaulle's Speeches to the French in 1943, as well as two booklets, Voyage du général de Gaulle en Syrie et au Liban, published by the Lebanese branch of Free France's Information and Broadcasting Service in 1942, and Écrits du général de Gaulle, published by the Printing and Publishing Company in 1944.

After a brief foray into Algiers, he returned to Beirut in 1945 and taught for six years at the newly created Graduate School of Letters (Saint Joseph University), which was attached to the Faculty of Letters in Lyon. It was then that, after having abandoned a first thesis project on the role of Arabs in the transmission of Greek thought, he completed a doctoral thesis and a complementary thesis on the Orientalist idealist Volney, who was very famous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was completed in 1947 and published in 1951. In the meantime, he was working on an unprecedented project: the creation of a large French university for the entire Near East, a mixed university whose teaching would revolve around the Humanities and Sciences, a project that would not see the light of day.

From 1947 to 1956, he was mayor of his native village, on the borders of Berry and Bourbonnais.

Upon his return to France in 1951, he was assigned to the University of Strasbourg in order to exploit the "Gobineau Collection" (kept at the National and University Library of Strasbourg), for which he coordinated the publication of three volumes of Gobineau's collected works for the Pleiades Library. He was also editor of the journal Études Gobiniennes.

During his stay of nearly twenty years in Strasbourg, Gaulmier became secretary of the Association des Publications (1953), director of the IPES (1958), and elected representative of the Faculty to the University Council (1964–1967 and 1967–1970).

In parallel to his teaching, he carried out several missions in Africa for UNESCO: in Morocco for the study of school planning and the arabization of public education (1958); in Ivory Coast for the adaptation of school programs (1961); in Tananarive at the Colloquium of Experts for the adaptation of programs in Africa (1962); in Cameroon for the study of the unification of the teaching systems between Eastern and Western Cameroon (1963).

Elected to the Sorbonne in 1969, Jean Gaulmier taught there until his retirement in 1975.

In 1986, he published Hélène et la solitude, after decades of confinement in a closet. What made Éric Deschodt say: "During all this time, Jean Gaulmier deprived the public of a marvelous history of disenchantment".

Works

Non-fiction

• Charles de Gaulle écrivain (1945)
• L'Idéologue Volney (1951)
• Gérard de Nerval et les Filles du Feu (1957)
• Un Grand témoin de la Révolution: Volney (1959)
• L'Univers de Marcel Jouhandeau (1959)
• Le Spectre de Gobineau (1965)
• Michelet (1968)
• Gobineau et sa Fortune Littéraire (1971)
• Autour du Romantisme: de Volney à J.-P. Sartre (1977)

Fiction

• Terroir (1931; 1984)
• Matricule Huit (1932; 1985)
• Hélène et la Solitude (1986)

Miscellania

• À la manière de... 1942 (1942)
• Combattant malgré eux (1945)

Critical editions

• Anthologie de Gaulle (1942)
• Aragon, Le Crève Cœur (1942; introduction by Jean Gaulmier)
• Péguy et nous, choix de Jean Gaulmier (1943)
• Discours aux Français du Général de Gaulle (1943)
• Khalil Zahiri, Zubda Kachf al-Mamalik (1950)
• Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1959)
• André Breton, Ode à Charles Fourier (1961)
• Les Mille et une Nuits (1965)
• Gobineau, Nouvelles Asiatiques (1965; Critics' Union award for best edition in 1966)
• Gobineau, Le Mouchoir rouge et autres nouvelles (1968)
• Renan, Vie de Jésus (1974)
• Gobineau, Œuvres (1975)

Selected articles

• "Les Réalisations Originales de la France Libre," Revue de la France Libre, No. 20 (juillet-août 1949)
• "Note sur l'Itinéraire de Volney en Egypte et en Syrie," Bulletin d'études orientales, Vol. XIII (1949–1951)
• "Pantagruel en l'Isle des Célestins," Revue de la France Libre, No. 36‎ (mars 1951)
• "Poésie et Vérité chez George Sand," Revue des Sciences Humaines, No. 345 (1959)
• "La Leçon de Sagesse de Jacques Berque," Le Monde (24 février 1989)
• "Rencontres avec le Général de Gaulle (1941-1944)," Espoir, No. 68‎ (septembre 1989)
• "Rêve et réalité dans Akrivie Phrangopoulo." In: Michel Crouzet, ed., Arthur de Gobineau cent ans après 1882-1982. Actes du Colloque de la Société des Études Romantiques, novembre 1982. Paris: Librairie Minard (1990)

References

• Gérald, Antoine (1997). "Jean Gaulmier (1905-1997)," Études Renaniennes, No. 103, pp. 170–71.
• Paoli, Bruno (2006). "Jean Gaulmier le Syrien." In: Jean Gaulmier, un Orientaliste: Recueil des Textes Publiés dans le Bulletin d’Études Orientales (1929-1972). Damas: Presses de l’Ifpo.

External links

• Works by Jean Gaulmier at Gallica
• Works by Jean Gaulmier at Persée