Georges Dumézil


Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society. He is considered one of the major contributors to mythography, in particular for his formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis of social class in ancient societies.

Biography

Dumézil's father was a classicist and Georges became interested in ancient languages at a young age and, by the end of his life, he is said to have spoken many languages fluently. During his time in secondary school, he was also influenced by Michel Bréal, a leading French philologist who was the grandfather of one of his classmates. By the time that he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1916, he was already on the road to studying linguistics and the classics.
Dumézil's studies were delayed by World War I, when he was drafted and served as an artillery officer. After the war, he resumed them and was particularly influenced by Antoine Meillet. He aggregated in 1919 in Classics and received his doctorate in 1924 after writing a thesis comparing the common origins of the Greek ambrosia and a similarly named Indian drink Amrita, which was said to make its imbiber immortal. The dissertation was controversial because some of the examiners, such as Henri Hubert, thought that Dumézil took liberty with the facts to generate a more beautiful interpretation.
Feeling that he had little place in the French academy, Dumézil moved to Turkey in 1925 to teach at the University of Istanbul, created as part of Kemal Atatürk's attempt to create a modern, secular nation. He learned Turkish and developed an interest in the Ubykh language and travelled widely in Russia, Turkey and the Caucasus. As a result, he became one of the premier experts of Caucasian languages to work in French. He compared the Etruscan language with the Caucasian languages. In 1931, he took another position, in Uppsala, Sweden, which allowed him to improve his skills in the Germanic stock of Indo-European.
In 1929, he published Flamen-Brahman, the first full statement of his trifunctional hypothesis; the idea was repeated in Mitra-Varuna, perhaps his most accessible work.
Dumézil's influence rose in the mid-1930s. In 1935 he left Uppsala to take up a chair of Comparative Religion of Indo-European Peoples at the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études. He was named a professor at the Collège de France in 1949, and was finally elected to the Académie française in 1978 thanks to the patronage of his colleague and fellow student of myth, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1984 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
Dumézil is also well known for mentoring many younger French scholars. Michel Foucault, for instance, benefitted from his patronage when Dumézil arranged for him to teach temporarily in Uppsala early on in his career. Georges Charachidzé, a historian and linguist of Georgian origin under Dumézil's tutelage, became a noted specialist of the Caucasian cultures and aided Dumézil in the reconstruction of the Ubykh language.
Many themes of Dumézil's work have continued influence in ancient religious studies: his impulse to comparative study, and his basic insight that polytheistic gods must be studied not simply by themselves but in the pairs and the ensembles in which their worshippers grouped them.

Criticism

Dumézil's politics are much more often criticised than his monolithic scholarly work. Bruce Lincoln has leveled accusations of fascism against Dumézil. The scholars Arnaldo Momigliano, Carlo Ginzburg, and Lincoln argue that Dumézil was in favor of a traditional hierarchical order in Europe, that his Indo-European dualism and tripartite ideology may be also related to Italian and French fascist ideas and that he was in favor of French fascism ; none of them thought that he was a supporter of German Nazism. Lincoln states:
"hose on the New Right, like Alain de Benoist, Jean Haudry, or Roger Pearson, cite Dumézil's writings in support of their positions—their fondness for hierarchy and authority, for example, their antipathy toward egalitarianism and the ideals of the Enlightenment, or their triumphal view of ‘Indo-Europeans’ as superior to all other peoples—we may suspect them of appropriating nothing other than positions of the Old Right that have been brilliantly recoded and misrepresented first as ancient wisdom, and second as scholarly discourse."

In the 1930s, Dumézil supported the far-right, royalist, anti-democratic and anti-German Action Française and held for a while Benito Mussolini in high regard, while steadfastly opposing Nazism and voicing as a journalist his opposition to the growing danger posed by German nationalism. However, Dumézil never joined Action Française, contending that "too many things separated from them. The credo of the Action Française was a block: it forbade both appreciating Edmond Rostand and believing in the innocence of Captain Dreyfus." Dumézil joined the Free Masonry in the early 1930s, as a member of the Portique lodge of the Grande Loge de France of the Scottish Rite and thus was summarily dismissed from his teaching positions and from the civil service by the Vichy State.
Lincoln notes that Dumézil "maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation" with Nouvelle Droite figures like de Benoist and Haudry, "both of whom courted him avidly". Among his "closest colleagues" were Otto Höfler, Jan de Vries and Stig Wikander. In response to a text written by Momigliano indicating that he might have been keen on Nazi ideology, Dumézil wrote "fascist and Nazi conceptions of a hierarchical society have never been part of my intuition nor of my conduct".
Such criticism of Dumézil has been emphatically disputed by philosopher Didier Eribon in his 1992 book Faut-il brûler Dumézil ? Mythologie, science et politique . In a survey article on Dumézil's work, Dean A. Miller devoted two pages on the case and concluded that "at its worst, the effort tries to remove the importance of whole theoretical constructions on the basis of some adduced or invented political flaw found in the past, often the remote past, of their creator. This derogation is not simple-minded 'political correctness'. It is, in my opinion, the blindest intellectual self-mutilation".
In order to clarify the debate regarding his political opinion, Georges Dumézil has declared to Eribon in 1987: "the principle, not simply monarchical, but dynastic, which protects the highest office of the State from caprices and ambitions, seemed to me, and still seems to me, preferable to the generalized election in which we have been living since Danton and Bonaparte. The example of the monarchies of the North confirmed to me this feeling. Of course, the formula is not applicable in France."

Works in English