Henri Maspero

Henri Maspero
Born Henri Paul Gaston Maspero
( 1883 -12-15)15 December 1883
Paris, France
Died 17 March 1945 ( 1945 -03-17) (aged 61)
Buchenwald concentration camp, Nazi Germany
Fields Daoism, Chinese history
Institutions La Sorbonne
École Pratique des Hautes Études
Academic advisors Édouard Chavannes
Sylvain Lévi
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 馬伯樂
Simplified Chinese 马伯乐

Henri Paul Gaston Maspero (15 December 1883  17 March 1945) was a French sinologist and professor who contributed to a variety of topics relating to East Asia. Maspero is best known for his pioneering studies of Daoism.

Life and career

Henri Maspero was born on 15 December 1883 in Paris, France. His father, Gaston Maspero, was a famous French Egyptologist who was of Italian ancestry. Maspero was also Jewish.[1] After studies in history and literature, in 1905 he joined his father in Egypt, and later published the study Les Finances de l'Egypte sous les Lagides. After returning to Paris in 1907, he studied the Chinese language under Édouard Chavannes and law at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales. In 1908, he went to Hanoi, studying at the École française d'Extrême-Orient.

In 1918 he succeeded to Édouard Chavannes in the Chair of Chinese at the Collège de France. He published his monumental La Chine Antique in 1927. During the following years he replaced Marcel Granet for the chair of Chinese civilisation at the Sorbonne, directed the department of Chinese religions at the École pratique des hautes études, and was selected to be a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.

On 26 July 1944, Maspero and his wife, who were still living in Nazi-occupied Paris, were arrested because of their son's involvement with the French Resistance.[2] Maspero was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he endured its brutal conditions for over six months before dying on 17 March 1945, aged 61, only three weeks before the camp's liberation by the U.S. Third Army.

See also

References

Works cited

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, April 05, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.