Clément Fabre

The history of places of remembrance, which focuses primarily on commemorative ceremonies, pays little attention to the ordinary life of such heritage sites, the meanings they assume over time, and the practices they help to anchor outside of the cyclical rhythm of commemoration. That is precisely what this article sets out to explore. By drawing on various sources that document everyday life at the École normale supérieure in Paris, this article seeks to reconstruct the commemorative as well as the playful, profane, artistic, and militant practices that surround these monuments, which are sometimes subject to indifference and forgetting ; it also examines how these monuments relate to the identity of the ENS community.

Since the 16th century onwards, the strangeness and difficulty of the Chinese language have caused Jesuit missionaries and European scholars to marvel, a fascination which still resonates with Roland Barthes’ or Henri Michaux’s during the 20th century. Yet, the 19th century occupies a place of its own in this centuries-long history: even though Parisian sinologists managed to master the Chinese language better than anyone in Europe until them, they endeavoured to distinguish its deciphering from ordinary readings. Putting the Chinese language outside the common register of reading allowed the emergent sinological science to assert its monopoly on it by defining the only legitimate way to decipher it. What was the right to read in the Chinese language? What tools should be used to approach a Chinese manuscript? How should it be read, and what emotions was it supposed to convey? The deciphering of the Chinese language was thus the focus of an exceptional theorization. This did not prevent non-Sinologist actors, such as art lovers and poets, from persisting in reading the Chinese language differently, and reading something else therein – whether the value of a Chinese vase or the secret of a poetic effect. The case-study of the Chinese language in 19th century Paris thus makes it possible to address two questions that have been largely neglected by the history of reading: does the act of reading vary according to the languages read? And what does one read in a text, apart from its meaning?


Depuis le xvie siècle, l’étrangeté et la difficulté de la langue chinoise fascinent les missionnaires jésuites comme les savants européens, et cette fascination trouve encore un écho au xxe siècle dans celle qu’un Roland Barthes ou un Henri Michaux vouent à l’idiome du Céleste Empire. Dans cette histoire séculaire, toutefois, le xixe siècle occupe une place à part, où les sinologues parisiens, alors même qu’ils parviennent à maîtriser la langue chinoise mieux que quiconque en Europe jusqu’alors, s’efforcent de distinguer son déchiffrement des lectures ordinaires. Reléguer la langue chinoise hors du registre commun de la lecture permet en effet à la sinologie naissante d’affirmer son monopole sur cette langue en définissant les modalités de son déchiffrement légitime. Qu’a-t-on le droit de lire dans la langue chinoise ? Avec quels outils doit-on aborder un manuscrit chinois ? Comment doit-on le lire, et quelles émotions sa lecture est-elle censée procurer ? Le déchiffrement de la langue chinoise fait ainsi l’objet d’une exceptionnelle théorisation. Ce qui n’empêche pas pour autant des acteurs non sinologues, tels les amateurs d’art et les poètes, de s’obstiner à lire différemment la langue chinoise, et à y lire autre chose – que ce soit la valeur d’un vase chinois ou le secret d’un effet poétique. Le cas de la langue chinoise dans le Paris du xixe siècle permet ainsi d’aborder deux questions largement négligées par l’histoire de la lecture : l’acte de lecture varie-t-il au gré des langues lues ? Et que lit-on dans un texte, hormis son sens ?

In China, one cannot sleep a wink at night. This complaint runs throughout the nineteenth century, through travelers’ stories and settlements’ newspapers, doctors strive to find its anthropological roots in the lesser sensitivity of Chinese people to noise, and it motivates, finally, various projects to ban noise pollution and exclude the Chinese inhabitants of foreign settlements. The reason lies in the fear of Chinese climate effects, the desire to base the inferiority of the Chinese on racial differences, and plans to westernize China.

Impossible, en Chine, de fermer l’œil de la nuit. Si cette plainte parcourt, pendant tout le xixe siècle, récits de voyageurs et presse des concessions, si les médecins s’efforcent d’en trouver les racines anthropologiques dans une moindre sensibilité des Chinois au bruit, et si elle motive, enfin, divers projets d’interdiction des nuisances sonores et d’exclusion des habitants chinois des concessions, c’est que s’articulent derrière elle craintes des effets du climat chinois, volonté de fonder en différence raciale l’infériorité des Chinois, et projets d’occidentalisation de la Chine.

What place does French sinology of the nineteenth century reserve for the Chinese in the study of their own language? The specificity of the Parisian Sinological territory, within which several competing conceptions of sinology come face to face, each one backed up by a specific definition of the Chinese language, prevents a clear answer. Neither an overall rejection of Chinese skills, nor unanimous recognition of their value, but rather several antagonistic creations of the Chinese language, attributing various roles to the Chinese, according to the situations and strategies. Where cabinet sinologists define an ancient Chinese person whose intelligence would have been lost in China and would be accessible only in Paris, sinologists in the field, eager to undermine the authority of the former, recognise the Celestial mastery of a language that is unchanged since the dawn of time, whereas the secular journals struggle to conceive that there can be a Chinese language specialist that is better than a Chinese person.

Ce mémoire vise à dégager l'objet historique spécifique que constitue au XIXe siècle la langue chinoise à Paris. Comment les différents acteurs qui mobilisent cette catégorie définissent-ils la langue chinoise ? Où, comment et sous quelles formes la rencontrent-ils ? Dans quelles perspectives est-elle utilisée ou étudiée ? Le chinois parisien qui émerge de cette étude est protéiforme – objet théorique étudié par les philologues et les linguistes, objet ridicule qui fait la joie des caricaturistes, objet esthétique dans lequel les poètes espèrent trouver l'inspiration –, mais trouve sa cohérence dans son étrangeté absolue. Qu'il suscite la curiosité intellectuelle, le rire ou la fascination, c'est ce sentiment d'une altérité radicale qui fonde le « chinois parisien ».

In an 1874 pamphlet, former missionary to China Paul Perny accused the marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, and his predecessor Stanislas Julien of being imposters. Perny’s Charlatanisme littéraire dévoilé (Literary Charlatanism Revealed) ultimately got him convicted of libel. The complexity of the affair, mixing the practices of learned controversies, the struggle between two rival branches of Sinology, and recourse to the influence of public opinion, allows us to review a century of the conflictual institutionalization of Sinology in France.

From 1814 to 1900, the way the Chinese language is conceived of in Paris – which appears as a real Mecca for sinologists, luring numerous Chinese books, Chinese travelers and sinologists – greatly differs from the 21th century conceptions. The analysis of the way one could encounter that language in 19th century Paris, and of the different knowledges and representations revolving around it, enables the historian to restitute the very status of the “Chinese language” category in the eye of the 19th century Parisian.

Several conceptions of the Chinese language, and even contradictory ones, can be found in the Paris of 1867. Those discrepancies can be explained by the circumstances in which people are confronted with that language: everyone does not enjoy the same access to Chinese, everyone does not experience the same influences about it, nor is everyone interested in Chinese for the same reasons. Studying those different conceptions of the same thing proves how interesting it can be to study the history of international relations from below and to focus on individual experiences and conceptions.