1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Paris, Bruno Paulin Gaston

PARIS, BRUNO PAULIN GASTON (1839–1903), French scholar, son of Paulin Paris, was born at Avenay (Marne) on the 9th of August 1839. In his childhood Gaston Paris learned to appreciate the Old French romances as poems and stories, and this early impulse to the study of Romance literature was placed on a solid basis by courses of study at Bonn (1856–1857) under Friedrich Diez, at Göttingen (1857–1858) and finally at the École des Chartes (1858–1861). His first important work was an Étude sur le rôle de l’accent latin dans la langue française (1862). The subject was developed later in his Lettre à M. Léon Gautier sur la versification latine rhythmique (1866). Gaston Paris maintained that French versification was a natural development of popular Latin methods which depended on accent rather than quantity, and were as widely different from classical rules as the Low Latin was from the classical idiom. For his degree as doctor he presented a thesis on the Histoire poétique de Charlemagne (1865). He succeeded his father as professor of medieval French literature at the Collège de France in 1872; in 1876 he was admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions and in 1896 to the French Academy; and in 1895 he was appointed director of the Collège de France. Gaston Paris won a European reputation as a Romance scholar. He had learnt German methods of exact research, but besides being an accurate philologist he was a literary critic of great acumen and breadth of view, and brought a singularly clear mind to bear on his favourite study of medieval French literature. His Vie de Saint-Alexis (1872) broke new ground and provided a model for future editors of medieval texts. It included the original text and the variations of it dating from the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. Gaston Paris contributed largely to the Histoire littéraire de la France, and with Paul Meyer published Romania, a journal devoted to the study of Romance literature. Among his other numerous works may be mentioned Les Plus anciens monuments de la langue française (1875); a Manuel d’ancien Français (1888); an edition of the Mystère de la passion d’Arnoul Greban (1878), in collaboration with M. Gaston Raynaud; Deux rédactions du roman des sept sages de Rome (1876); a translation of the Grammaire des langues romanes (1874–1878) of Friedrich Diez, in collaboration with MM. Brachet and Morel-Fatio. Among his works of a more popular nature are La Poésie du moyen âge (1885 and 1895); Penseurs et poètes (1897); Poèmes et légendes du moyen âge (1900); François Villon (1901), an admirable monograph contributed to the “Grands Écrivains Français” series; Légendes du moyen âge (1903). His excellent summary of medieval French literature forms a volume of the Temple Primers. Gaston Paris endeared himself to a wide circle of scholars outside his own country by his unfailing urbanity and generosity. In France itself he trained at the École des Chartes and the Collège de France a band of disciples who continued the traditions of exact research that he established. Among them were: Léopold Pannier; Marius Sepet, the author of Le Drame chrétien au moyen age (1878) and of the Origines catholiques du théâtre moderne (1901); Charles Joret; Alfred Morel-Fatio; Gaston Raynaud, who is responsible for various volumes of the excellent editions published by the Société des anciens textes français; Arsène Darmesteter and others. Gaston Paris died in Paris on the 6th of March 1903.

See “Hommage à Gaston Paris” (1903), the opening lecture of his successor, Joseph Bédier, in the chair of medieval literature at the Collège de France; A. Thomas, Essais de philologie française (1897); W. P. Ker, in the Fortnightly Review (July, 1904); M. Croiset, Notice sur Gaston Paris (1904); J. Bédier et M. Roques, Bibliographie des travaux de Gaston Paris (1904).