History of Sinology/Chapter 8

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Chapter 8: France — The Collège de France Tradition and the Golden Age of Philological Sinology

1. The Jesuits and Proto-Sinology

The history of French sinology begins not in the lecture halls of Paris but in the imperial courts, mission stations, and printing houses of late Ming and early Qing China. No European nation invested so heavily in the intellectual encounter with China as France, and no nation reaped richer scholarly dividends. The trajectory from Jesuit proto-sinology to the establishment of the first university chair in Chinese studies in 1814 forms one of the great arcs in the history of Western orientalism — and it was driven, from the outset, by a distinctive combination of royal patronage, philosophical curiosity, and philological ambition.

The French Jesuit mission to China was inaugurated under the direct sponsorship of Louis XIV. In 1685, six men bearing the title of “Royal Mathematicians” (mathématiciens du roi) departed for the East. Five of them — Jean de Fontaney, Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Gerbillon, Louis Le Comte, and Claude de Visdelou — arrived at Ningbo in July 1687 and proceeded to Beijing, where they were received by the Kangxi Emperor in 1688. The scientific credentials of these missionaries were central to the Jesuit strategy of accommodation first articulated by Matteo Ricci: by impressing the Chinese court with European advances in astronomy, mathematics, and cartography, the Jesuits aimed to win a hearing for their gospel. Bouvet and Gerbillon served as tutors to the Kangxi Emperor in mathematics and astronomy, earning his confidence and patronage.

The consequences for sinological knowledge were profound. When Bouvet returned to France in 1697, he carried forty-nine volumes of Chinese books — a gift from the Kangxi Emperor to Louis XIV — and recruited a second wave of missionaries, including Joseph de Prémare, Dominique Parrenin, Jean-Baptiste Régis, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla, Antoine Gaubil, and Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot. These men would become the greatest scholarly missionaries of the eighteenth century, producing works that laid the foundations for every subsequent generation of French sinologists.

The Three Great Works of Jesuit Sinology

Eighteenth-century Jesuit sinology culminated in three monumental compilations that historians have rightly called the “three great works” (trois grands ouvrages) of European proto-sinology.

The first was the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1702–1776), a thirty-four-volume collection of letters and reports from missionaries across Asia, of which volumes sixteen through twenty-six contained dispatches from China. The letters offered European readers vivid first-hand accounts of Chinese society, customs, and intellectual life — “thousands of new things” (des milliers de choses nouvelles), as one contemporary noted — and were rapidly translated into most European languages.

The second was Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735), a four-volume encyclopaedia of China compiled by a man who never set foot in the country. Du Halde drew on decades of Jesuit correspondence and reports to produce what the historian Mo Dongyin called “the greatest pyramid of Western sinology up to that time” (西洋汉学空前之金字塔). It contained translations of sections of the Shijing, stories from the Jin gu qi guan, Prémare’s translation of the Orphan of Zhao (Zhao shi gu er), and Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s maps of the Chinese empire. English, German, and Russian editions followed almost immediately. Voltaire and Montesquieu drew their knowledge of China largely from this work.

The third was the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages des Chinois (1776–1814), a sixteen-volume collection of scholarly essays on Chinese history, science, art, and customs. Unlike Du Halde’s compilation, the Mémoires preserved the original texts of its contributors and aspired to the character of an academic periodical rather than an encyclopaedia. Its publication marked, as one scholar observed, “the completion of an enterprise inaugurated by Ricci” and the summit of Jesuit scholarship on China.

Among the Jesuit scholars who advanced the linguistic study of Chinese, Joseph de Prémare (1666–1736) deserves special mention. His Notitia linguae sinicae, completed in manuscript around 1728 but not published until 1831 (when Robert Morrison issued it in Malacca), was the most sophisticated grammar of classical Chinese composed in the eighteenth century. Prémare distinguished clearly between the literary language (wen) and the vernacular, provided extensive examples from Chinese belles-lettres, and demonstrated a command of idiomatic usage that was unmatched by any contemporary European work. As Honey notes, Prémare’s grammar circulated in manuscript among the Jesuits and was known to some European scholars, but its suppression by Étienne Fourmont — who wished to claim priority for his own Grammatica duplex — delayed its influence by more than a century.

Du Halde himself, though not a sinologist in the strict sense, exerted an incalculable influence on the European image of China and on the development of the discipline. His work established the template of wide-ranging coverage — geography, history, political institutions, religion, philosophy, literature, natural history — that would characterise French sinological production for the next two centuries. It also demonstrated the value of systematically exploiting Jesuit sources, a practice that later professional sinologists would both continue and critique.

An essential precondition for the development of French sinology was the systematic accumulation of Chinese books in Paris. When Bouvet returned from China in 1697, the forty-nine volumes he brought constituted the nucleus of what would become the finest Chinese collection in Europe. By 1720, the Royal Library held approximately one thousand Chinese volumes. After 1722, the collection expanded dramatically when Foucquet brought back 3,980 volumes from China. Parrenin and Prémare also sent large consignments. By 1742, Fourmont had compiled a catalogue of the Chinese holdings, which numbered approximately four thousand volumes and were made available to readers.[^fn_books1]

The Jesuit missionary Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot maintained a decades-long correspondence with the librarians of the Royal Library, actively seeking out rare Chinese books in Beijing. “The books I have sent to the Royal Library are now very difficult to find,” he wrote to his patron Bertin. “Only by chance can one occasionally come across them.” Amiot understood the potential value of these works and was motivated not only by a desire to serve European scholarship but also by a prescient concern for the preservation of Chinese cultural heritage — he was well aware of the Chinese history of book-burning and literary inquisition.[^fn_books2]

As Demiéville observed: “The collection of Chinese books held by the Royal Library played an important role in the development of French sinological research; it was thanks to these precious collections that French sinology was able to leave other European countries far behind in the nineteenth century.”[^fn_books3] The accumulation of these resources over more than a century provided the material foundation without which the transition to professional sinology would not have been possible.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the compilation of a comprehensive Chinese-French dictionary was a recurring ambition of French sinologists — and a recurring failure. Huang Jialüe (Arcade Hoang), the Fujianese scholar who worked in Paris from 1702 until his early death in 1716, began two dictionaries: one organised by pronunciation (42 pages) and one by radicals (998 pages, containing 5,210 characters). Neither was completed. Fourmont took over Huang’s manuscripts and continued the work, but his energies were dissipated across too many projects. The younger De Guignes inherited the ambition but could not bring it to fruition during the eighteenth century.

It was not until 1813 that Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes (the younger) finally published the Dictionnaire chinois, français et latin, based largely on the manuscript Chinese-Latin dictionary compiled by the Italian Jesuit Basilio Brollo in 1694–1699. The dictionary, containing approximately 14,000 characters, was a typographical marvel — printed using Chinese characters that Fourmont had commissioned to be carved decades earlier — but it was not without serious defects. Rémusat, who would soon occupy the Collège de France chair, published a devastating critique, and the German-Russian sinologist Julius Klaproth issued a Supplément (1819) that corrected many of its errors. Nevertheless, the publication of the dictionary marked the culmination of a century-long effort and provided an indispensable tool for the nascent discipline of professional sinology.[^fn_dict]

The broader cultural context for the emergence of professional sinology was the wave of “Chinoiserie” or “China fever” (中国热) that swept through French intellectual life from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. This phenomenon, which went far beyond the importation of Chinese porcelain, silk, and lacquerware, involved a sustained engagement with Chinese ideas — particularly Confucian ethics and Chinese political institutions — by some of the most prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment.

The philosopher La Mothe Le Vayer compared Confucius to Socrates as early as 1641. Voltaire praised Chinese governance as a model of enlightened despotism. The Physiocrats, led by François Quesnay, found in China evidence for their theories of natural economic order. Even critics of China, such as Montesquieu, engaged seriously with Chinese sources in formulating their arguments. As Zhang Xiping argues, this intellectual ferment — the vigorous debate about the meaning of Chinese civilisation for European self-understanding — created the “social and cultural conditions” necessary for sinology to become an academic discipline. “If there had been no ‘China fever,’ no interest among French intellectuals in Chinese culture, the establishment of sinology as a professional discipline might have been delayed considerably.”[^fn_fever]

2. Abel-Rémusat and the First Chair (1814)

The transition from Jesuit proto-sinology to professional, university-based sinology was neither sudden nor inevitable. It required a confluence of intellectual, institutional, and political conditions that came together in France during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

Throughout the eighteenth century, a handful of secular scholars in Paris had attempted to study Chinese without the benefit of residence in China or fluency in the language. Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745), working with the Fujianese informant Arcade Hoang (Huang Jialüe), compiled dictionaries and grammars of Chinese that were, by modern standards, deeply flawed — Fourmont believed, for instance, that mastery of the 214 radicals would unlock the entire language — but that represented the first sustained effort by a non-missionary European to grapple with Chinese linguistics. His rival Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749), a historian and philologist of greater rigour, focused on Chinese chronology and its implications for biblical history, and in 1714 became the first European to read Chinese poetry aloud to a learned audience — an occasion described by Zhang Xiping as “the first encounter between Chinese poetry and Europe.”

These early efforts, however, remained amateurish. The secular sinologists of the eighteenth century worked from second-hand materials, could not read Chinese texts independently, and often subordinated their research to larger philosophical or theological agendas. As Zhang Xiping observes, their writings were “superficial selections, crude introductions, and simplistic commentaries, lacking the illumination of a distinguished historical or philosophical intelligence.”

The decisive rupture came with Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832). Born in Paris to a physician’s family, Rémusat discovered Chinese through the idle examination of a Chinese botanical illustration in a private collection. The mysterious characters fired his imagination, and he resolved to teach himself the language. With no teachers available and no courses on offer, he worked from Fourmont’s Lingua sinica and from scattered Jesuit translations, supplemented by a manuscript copy of a Chinese-Latin dictionary that he obtained only in 1812.

In 1811, after five years of self-study, Rémusat published his first sinological work, the Essai sur la langue et la littérature chinoises, which announced both his competence and his ambitions. On 29 November 1814, the Collège de France established a chair of “Chinese and Tartar-Manchu Languages and Literatures” (langues et littératures chinoise et tartare-mandchoue), and Rémusat was appointed to fill it. He delivered his inaugural lecture on 16 January 1815.

This was a founding moment for Western sinology. The creation of a dedicated university chair signified that the study of China had become a recognised academic discipline — no longer an appendage of missionary work, oriental curiosity, or philosophical speculation. Rémusat was the first professional sinologist in the West: a man who held no ecclesiastical or diplomatic office, who earned his living by teaching and writing about China, and who applied the methods of modern philology to Chinese texts.

His contributions were manifold. His Éléments de la grammaire chinoise (1822) was hailed by Maspero as “the first grammar written according to the genius of the Chinese language” and by others as “the birth certificate of modern sinology.” His translation of the novel Yu jiao li (1826) enjoyed enormous success in France and was retranslated into English the following year. His annotated translation of Faxian’s Fo guo ji — the Relation des royaumes bouddhiques — was, in the judgement of Paul Demiéville, “the greatest and most enduring” of his works, and for the first time conveyed to the West a fair and scholarly account of Buddhism, free from the distortions of missionary hostility.

Rémusat also founded the Société Asiatique in 1822 and served as director of the Oriental division of the Royal Library. He trained a generation of students, among them Stanislas Julien, who would carry French sinology to new heights. His premature death during the cholera epidemic of 1832 cut short a career of extraordinary promise, but his legacy was secure: he had established the institutional, methodological, and intellectual framework within which French sinology would flourish for the rest of the century.

Zhang Xiping identifies several characteristics that distinguished Rémusat’s professional sinology from the amateur efforts of his predecessors. First, the research was conducted in France rather than in China — the professional sinologist did not need to be a missionary or a diplomat with direct access to Chinese society, but could work from texts, dictionaries, and library collections. This carried the risk of abstraction and the loss of “fieldwork” experience, but it also freed the scholar from the institutional constraints and ideological commitments of the missionary enterprise. Second, the purpose of research shifted from religious propagation to cultural understanding — Chinese studies became, in Rémusat’s hands, a humanistic discipline rather than a by-product of evangelism. Third, the professional sinologist brought to the study of China the methods of modern European scholarship — philological rigour, systematic comparison, attention to linguistic evidence — rather than the impressionistic and often tendentious approaches of the amateur. Fourth, Rémusat inaugurated the tradition of cross-cultural comparison, examining China’s relations with its Central Asian neighbours and using Chinese textual sources to illuminate broader Asian history. As Chavannes later observed, Rémusat was “the first to attempt to consider as a whole all the peoples of the north and west who had relations with China.” Finally, Rémusat brought literature into the centre of sinological attention, translating novels, short stories, and Buddhist narratives as “windows” onto Chinese civilisation — an approach that reflected the broader French intellectual conviction that literature was the mirror of society.[^fn_remusat_method]

3. Stanislas Julien — Consolidation

Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) succeeded Rémusat at the Collège de France and held the chair for over four decades. If Rémusat was the founder, Julien was the consolidator — a translator of prodigious industry whose output established the range and depth of French sinological scholarship.

Julien’s linguistic abilities were extraordinary. He was fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and his command of classical Chinese was acknowledged by Chinese scholars themselves. His translations encompassed an astonishing variety of texts: the Mencius, the Tao Te Ching, Buddhist scriptures, the Orphan of Zhao, technical manuals on sericulture and porcelain manufacture, and, most notably, the Life of Xuanzang (Vie et voyages de Hiouen-Thsang, 1853) and Xuanzang’s own record of his journey to India (Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales, 1857–1858).

These last two works consolidated the line of research that Rémusat had opened with his translation of the Fo guo ji. The French tradition of using Chinese Buddhist travel literature as a source for the historical geography of Central and South Asia — what Chavannes later called the study of China’s relations with the peoples of the north and west — became one of the hallmarks of the Paris school.

Julien also established the Prix Stanislas Julien, an international prize for Chinese translation awarded by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which became the most prestigious recognition in the field. James Legge was among its recipients (1875), a testament to the international reach of French sinological standards.

Yet Julien’s legacy is not without ambiguity. His very productivity sometimes came at the expense of philological rigour. Later scholars, particularly Pelliot, would fault the precision of some of his renderings. And the breadth of his translations, ranging from philosophy to sericulture, reflected a conception of sinology as the total study of Chinese civilisation — a conception that would be challenged, in the twentieth century, by the rise of specialised disciplines.

Between Julien and Chavannes, the Collège de France chair was held by the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822–1892), a figure who has been somewhat unjustly neglected in standard histories of sinology. Honey mentions him briefly as a predecessor to Chavannes, but his contributions were not negligible.[^fn_hervey] D’Hervey de Saint-Denys was an aristocrat and polymath who published translations of Tang poetry (Poésies de l’époque des Thang, 1862) and a study of Chinese dream interpretation that anticipated later developments in the psychology of dreaming. His translations, rendered into accomplished French verse, represented a different approach to the problem of Chinese poetry in translation — one that aimed at literary elegance rather than philological precision. Though overshadowed by the achievements of his successor Chavannes, d’Hervey de Saint-Denys maintained the continuity of the chair during a transitional period and kept French sinology in the public eye through his literary publications.

Institutional Growth in Nineteenth-Century French Sinology

The development of French sinology in the nineteenth century was supported by an expanding institutional infrastructure. The Collège de France chair, established in 1814, was supplemented in 1843 by the creation of a Chinese language course at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes (now INALCO). In 1888, the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) was founded, initially based in Hanoi, to conduct research on the civilisations of East and Southeast Asia. The EFEO would become one of the most important sinological research institutions in the world, providing generations of French scholars with the opportunity to conduct fieldwork and archival research in Asia.

The founding of academic journals was equally significant. The Journal Asiatique, organ of the Société Asiatique, began publication in 1822 and provided the first regular French-language venue for sinological scholarship. The T’oung Pao, co-founded in 1890 with the Dutch sinologist Schlegel, quickly became the premier international sinological journal. The Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), launched in 1901, published the research of EFEO scholars. Together with the great research libraries and museums of Paris — the Bibliothèque nationale, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi — these institutions created an environment for sinological research that was unmatched anywhere in the world.[^fn_instit]

4. The Golden Age: Chavannes, Pelliot, Maspero

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed what may justly be called the golden age of French sinology. Between the appointment of Édouard Chavannes to the Collège de France in 1893 and the deaths of Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero in 1945, the Paris school produced a body of scholarship that set the standard for the entire discipline. David Honey, in Incense at the Altar, devotes the central section of his study to this “trio of giants,” and it is from his penetrating assessments, supplemented by Zhang Xiping’s account, that the following portraits are drawn.

Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918): The Father of Modern Sinology

Chavannes, born in Lyon and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, was appointed to the French legation in Beijing in 1889, where he began the research that would occupy the rest of his life. In 1893, he succeeded the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys at the Collège de France.

Honey identifies Chavannes as “the father of modern sinology” — a judgement shared by virtually all subsequent historians of the discipline. The basis for this claim is not merely Chavannes’s productivity, which was immense, but the quality and durability of his method. As Honey puts it: “Nothing he wrote is outdated today in terms of either intellectual assumption, conceptual clarity, or methodological approach.” Where his predecessors had worked from imperfect assumptions about the Chinese language, an insufficient command of traditional bibliography, and without the tools of historical phonology, Chavannes brought to sinology the standards of European classical philology — precision of translation, exhaustive annotation, mastery of primary sources, and a refusal to draw conclusions beyond the evidence.

Honey notes that the reason we may consider Chavannes to be the founder of professional sinology is that “nothing he wrote is outdated today in terms of either intellectual assumption, conceptual clarity, or methodological approach. That his works may need updating is something true of every scholarly production in the face of the advancement of knowledge. Yet his oeuvre retains its worth today as an entirety much better than that of his contemporaries because of his painstaking care for completeness, caution where proof was lacking, and mastery of a variety of sources.” Chavannes was also careful not to base too many conclusions on either comparative philology or historical phonology, since the science of Chinese linguistics was just getting started. Whatever use he made of historical phonology was carefully phrased in provisional terms, and as an adjunct to conclusions already reached by other means. His disciples Pelliot and Maspero were the first to utilise historical phonology in a systematic, sound way as a scholarly tool.[^fn_chav_method]

His masterpiece was his partial translation of the Shiji (Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien, five volumes, 1895–1905), which covered the first forty-seven chapters of Sima Qian’s great history. The translation was accompanied by a learned introduction, copious notes, and appendices that remain indispensable. Zhang Xiping calls it “a universally recognised masterpiece” (盖世名作), “still widely cited today.” The work established the model — a major Chinese text rendered into impeccable French with exhaustive scholarly apparatus — that Pelliot and Maspero would follow.

Chavannes’s interests extended far beyond the Shiji. His monograph Le T’ai Chan (1910), on the cult of Mount Tai, broke new ground in the study of Chinese popular religion. His Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale (1913–1915), based on fieldwork conducted in 1907 across Manchuria, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, pioneered the archaeological study of Chinese art and epigraphy in the West. He co-founded the study of Manichaeism in China (with Pelliot), contributed fundamental studies on the Turks, and published three volumes of Buddhist tales translated from the Chinese Tripitaka (Cinq cents contes et apologues extraits du Tripiṭaka chinois, 1910–1911), described as “a precious treasury for comparative research.”

Above all, Chavannes was a teacher. His students at the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études included Pelliot, Maspero, Granet, and the archaeologist-writer Victor Segalen. Zhang Xiping writes that Chavannes, “together with the students who gathered around him, maintained Paris’s crown as the capital of Western sinology right up to the end of the Second World War.”

Paul Pelliot (1878–1945): The Marco Polo of the Spirit

Pelliot was Chavannes’s most brilliant student and the greatest philologist of Chinese in the twentieth century. As Honey writes: “His tenacity of memory enabled him to marshal the facts of Chinese history, textual criticism, bibliography, and biography on almost any subject or period of time and analyze them in an orderly way. His store of knowledge was immense, enabling him to act as the final arbiter of sinological questions.”

Pelliot studied English at the Sorbonne before transferring to the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, where he studied Chinese under Chavannes. From 1900 to 1904 he worked at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi, interrupted by a dramatic stint during the Boxer Uprising at the Beijing legation. In 1905–1908, he led his famous archaeological expedition to Central Asia, arriving at the Dunhuang caves in 1908 — one year after Aurel Stein — and selecting, with his extraordinary bibliographical knowledge, the most valuable manuscripts from the sealed library. Although fewer in number than Stein’s haul, Pelliot’s selections were of superior quality. When he displayed some of his finds to Luo Zhenyu and other Chinese scholars in Beijing in 1909, they immediately recognised their importance.

In 1911, Pelliot was appointed professor of Central Asian Languages, History, and Archaeology at the Collège de France, a position he held until his death. He co-edited the T’oung Pao after Cordier’s death, and in 1935 was elected president of the Société Asiatique.

As Honey writes, “Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) became the greatest philologist of Chinese of this century.” His career was marked by extraordinary adventures as well as extraordinary erudition. During the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the young Pelliot — then barely twenty-two — distinguished himself by his courage during the siege of the Beijing legations. His Central Asian expedition of 1905–1908 took him through some of the most dangerous terrain on earth, and his selection of manuscripts from the Dunhuang caves was an act of bibliographical genius performed under conditions of extreme physical hardship. The manuscripts and artefacts he brought back are now divided between the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Musée Guimet, and form one of the most important collections for the study of medieval Chinese civilisation.[^fn_pelliot_extra]

Pelliot’s scholarship was characterised by an almost superhuman bibliographical command and a passion for exact annotation. His commentary style — dense, seriatim discussions of individual points arising from the translation of a major text — produced works of extraordinary erudition but sometimes forbidding dryness. His annotated editions of Marco Polo’s travel narrative and the Yuan chao bi shi (Secret History of the Mongols) were among his most ambitious undertakings, though neither was completed at his death. His study of Zheng He’s maritime expeditions (1933), his co-authored work with Chavannes on Manichaeism in China (1911), and his countless reviews and bibliographical notes all displayed the same qualities: precision, thoroughness, and an uncompromising demand for documentary proof.

Pelliot’s reputation as the “academic policeman” of sinology — the scholar whose devastating reviews could make or break a career — was well earned. Zhang Xiping notes that he was “the most authoritative sinologist in the international sinological community of the first half of the twentieth century,” a figure whose judgement few dared to challenge. Yet Honey observes that Pelliot’s very erudition could be “burdening”: his commitment to exhaustive documentation sometimes prevented him from achieving the broader syntheses that Maspero, with his more humanistic temperament, was able to produce.

Henri Maspero (1883–1945): “L’homme de la Chine antique”

Maspero, the son of the distinguished Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, brought to sinology a combination of philological rigour and historical imagination that made him, in many ways, the most complete scholar of the three. As Honey writes, he was “scarcely less skilled as an annotator and textual commentator” than Pelliot, “but he also possessed a highly developed feel for history that allowed him to summarize his research and to state provisional conclusions.”

Maspero served at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi from 1908 to 1920, where he conducted pathbreaking research on Vietnamese historical phonology that paved the way for Karlgren’s reconstruction of ancient Chinese pronunciation. In 1921, he succeeded Chavannes at the Collège de France. He visited Japan in 1928–1929, meeting the great Japanese sinologists Naitō Konan and Kano Naoki, and was one of the first Western scholars to recognise the importance of Japanese sinological scholarship.

Maspero’s approach to sinology was distinguished by what Honey calls a “humanistic” spirit. Where Pelliot’s work could seem dryly technical, Maspero’s research was animated by a deep sympathy for the human beings whose records he studied — their beliefs, their fears, their creative achievements. Even his most technical work on phonology and grammar was infused with a sense of the living language behind the written characters. His research on Daoism, for example, was motivated not merely by philological curiosity but by a genuine interest in the spiritual practices and cosmological beliefs that shaped the lives of millions of Chinese over many centuries.

His sole monograph, La Chine antique (1927), remains a landmark. Covering Chinese history down to the unification under Qin, it drew on an extraordinary command of primary sources and offered interpretations that, despite the vast expansion of archaeological evidence since its publication, retain their value. As Zhang Xiping notes, the book’s “rich and substantial documentation of original sources has never been revised and retains its reliable utility.”

Maspero’s research on Daoism — particularly his studies of yangsheng (“nourishing life”) practices in early medieval Daoism — opened an entirely new field. His monumental posthumous edition of the Chinese manuscripts from Stein’s third Central Asian expedition further cemented his reputation as a philologist of the first rank.

His death was a tragedy for scholarship and for humanity. Because of his Jewish ancestry, Maspero was arrested by the Nazis and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he perished in 1945 — the same year that saw the deaths of Pelliot (from illness) and of Granet’s legacy continued through his students. The simultaneous loss of these three scholars — Pelliot, Maspero, and Granet — devastated French sinology and marked the end of its golden age.

Bernhard Karlgren and the Discipline of Historical Phonology

Although Karlgren (1889–1978) was Swedish rather than French, his work belongs inescapably to the history of French sinology, for it was in Paris — and in dialogue with Chavannes, Pelliot, and Maspero — that the discipline of Chinese historical phonology was forged. Honey devotes an extended discussion to Karlgren within his treatment of the French school, emphasising the “mutual influence and tit-for-tat exchanges” between Maspero, Granet, and Karlgren in the journals of the period.[^fn_karlgren1]

Karlgren’s reconstruction of ancient Chinese phonology — Études sur la phonologie chinoise (1915–1926) and Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1923) — provided sinologists with a tool of fundamental importance. Before Karlgren, scholars working on pre-modern Chinese texts had no reliable way to determine how words had been pronounced in antiquity — a handicap that affected every aspect of textual analysis, from the identification of rhymes in the Shijing to the reconstruction of foreign proper names in Chinese transcription. Karlgren’s system, built on the systematic comparison of modern Chinese dialects with the evidence of the Qieyun rhyme dictionaries, made it possible for the first time to speak with precision about the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese.

Maspero was deeply engaged with phonological questions throughout his career. His Le dialecte de Tch’ang-ngan sous les T’ang (1920) was a pioneering study of the Tang-dynasty pronunciation of the capital dialect. His work on Vietnamese historical phonology during his years in Hanoi — including his Études phonétiques sur les dialectes du Tonkin — paved the way for Karlgren’s broader reconstruction. As Honey notes, “Maspero’s contemporaries, Marcel Granet (1884–1940) in the sociology of ancient China and Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978) in historical phonology, specialized in what to Maspero were general interests, and developed independent disciplines; but neither they nor Maspero can be appreciated without accounting for their mutual influence.”[^fn_karlgren2]

The development of historical phonology illustrates a larger point about the golden age of French sinology: the greatest advances came not from isolated individual genius but from the dense network of intellectual exchange that linked Paris, Hanoi, Stockholm, and Leiden. The Collège de France, the EFEO, the T’oung Pao, and the Société Asiatique provided the institutional framework for this exchange, and the common commitment to philological rigour provided its methodological foundation.

Henri Cordier (1849–1925), though less celebrated than Chavannes or Pelliot, made an indispensable contribution to French sinology through his bibliographical work. Born in the United States and educated in France, Cordier first travelled to China in 1869 and later held a position at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes. His magnum opus, the Bibliotheca Sinica (five volumes, 1904–1908, with a supplement in 1922–1924), was the first comprehensive bibliography of Western writings on China, covering publications from the earliest period to the 1920s. Organised by subject — covering geography, natural history, social development, religion, science, art, language, literature, customs, foreign relations, and overseas Chinese — it became the indispensable starting point for any serious research on China in the West. Cordier also co-edited the T’oung Pao with Schlegel and later with Pelliot, and published a four-volume general history of China (Histoire générale de la Chine, 1920–1921). Zhang Xiping records that although Cordier did not read Chinese, his bibliographical achievement earned him the title of “one of the greatest pioneers of Western sinology.”[^fn_cordier]

Among the late-nineteenth-century Jesuit sinologists who continued the tradition of missionary scholarship, Séraphin Couvreur (1835–1919) stands out. Arriving in China in 1870, Couvreur spent decades in the province of Zhili (Hebei), where he mastered classical Chinese and devoted himself to the translation of the Confucian canon. His translations of the Four Books (1895), the Shijing (1896), the Shujing (1897), the Liji (1899), the Chunqiu Zuozhuan (1914), and the Yili (1916) were characterised by a dual-language format: French and Latin side by side, the Latin often providing a word-for-word rendering that the freer French prose complemented. His dictionaries — the Dictionnaire français-chinois (1884) and the Dictionnaire chinois-français (1890) — were widely used. Couvreur’s translations, described by Zhang Xiping as “reliable and elegant” (准确优雅，无可挑剔), remained in print well into the second half of the twentieth century and continued to serve as reference works for students of the Chinese classics.[^fn_couvreur]

5. Granet and Sociological Sinology

Marcel Granet (1884–1940) stands apart from Chavannes, Pelliot, and Maspero by virtue of both his method and his intellectual lineage. While the three philologists derived their approach from the tradition of classical textual scholarship, Granet was shaped by the sociological school of Émile Durkheim, and he brought to sinology a set of questions and analytical tools that were fundamentally different from those of his contemporaries.

Granet studied at the École Normale Supérieure and learned Chinese under Chavannes, but his intellectual formation was profoundly marked by Durkheim’s sociology of religion. As Honey writes, Granet introduced into sinological research “a method that was at the time very novel: sociological research” (une méthode alors très nouvelle: la recherche sociologique).

His doctoral thesis, Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (1919), was a brilliant exercise in sociological interpretation. Taking the love songs of the Guofeng section of the Shijing as his primary material, Granet argued that they were not personal lyrics but the residue of seasonal festivals during which peasant communities — whose daily lives were rigidly segregated by gender — came together for ritualised courtship. The songs preserved traces of these collective celebrations, in which young men and women engaged in antiphonal singing contests that served as the mechanism for mate selection. As Granet explained, “the love poems that constitute the greater part of the Guofeng were collected and selected from ancient folk songs, composed on the basis of themes inspired by traditional improvised singing competitions.”

Honey’s treatment of Granet is characteristically balanced. He acknowledges Granet’s originality — what he calls “textual sociology” — but notes that Granet’s approach was sometimes too cavalier with the textual evidence. Granet tended to read through texts rather than reading them closely; his sociological categories sometimes overpowered the particularities of the sources. Yet his influence was enormous. His major works — La religion des Chinois (1922), La civilisation chinoise (1929), La pensée chinoise (1934), and the posthumous Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne (1939) — opened Chinese civilisation to analysis by the social sciences in a way that pure philology could not.

Granet’s death in 1940, caused by grief and despair at the German invasion of France, was mourned by both sinologists and sociologists. Zhang Xiping quotes the assessments that gave Granet “the temperament of a philosopher” and “the elegance of a poet” — qualities that set him apart from the more austere philological tradition represented by Pelliot and Chavannes.

6. Post-War Reconstruction: Demiéville, Gernet, Vandermeersch

The Second World War inflicted catastrophic losses on French sinology. The near-simultaneous deaths of Pelliot (1945), Maspero (1945), and Granet (1940), coupled with the disruption of Franco-Chinese scholarly exchange, left the field depleted. The task of reconstruction fell to Paul Demiéville (1894–1979), who became the central figure in post-war French sinology.

Demiéville, born in Lausanne and trained in Paris and Hanoi, was one of the foremost Buddhist scholars of the twentieth century. His deep knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan enabled him to work across the full range of East Asian Buddhist traditions with an authority matched by few contemporaries. He succeeded Maspero at the Collège de France and served as co-editor of the T’oung Pao with Erik Zürcher from 1947 onward.

Under Demiéville’s leadership, French sinology recovered its international standing. He initiated major collaborative projects — including the Anthologie de la poésie chinoise classique (1962), a landmark collection produced with the participation of many leading French sinologists — and trained a new generation of scholars who would carry the discipline into the late twentieth century. His own research on Chan Buddhism, Chinese phonology, and the history of Chinese literature remained of the highest quality.

Demiéville also established the research group for cataloguing the Pelliot Dunhuang manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque nationale, a project that was formally constituted in 1974 under the direction of Michel Soymié and that continues to produce fundamental work in Dunhuang studies.

Among Demiéville’s successors, Jacques Gernet (1921–2018) was the most distinguished. Appointed to the Collège de France in 1975 to the chair of “Social and Intellectual History of China” (Histoire sociale et intellectuelle de la Chine), Gernet held the position until 1992 and shaped an entire generation of French sinologists. His Le monde chinois (1972), a history of Chinese civilisation, became the standard French-language introduction to the subject. His studies of the Jesuit mission — particularly Chine et christianisme: Action et réaction (1982) — illuminated the cultural encounter between China and Europe with a depth and subtlety that transcended the conventional frameworks of both missionary history and the history of ideas.

Gernet’s appointment to the Collège de France also marked the full maturation of French sinology’s post-war reorientation. While the pre-war generation had focused overwhelmingly on pre-modern China, the post-war period saw growing attention to modern and contemporary China, driven in part by the establishment of diplomatic relations between France and the People’s Republic in 1964.

Léon Vandermeersch (1928–2021) represented another strand of the French tradition: the study of Chinese political thought and institutions. His magnum opus, Wangdao, ou la Voie royale (two volumes, 1977, 1980), analysed the religious and institutional foundations of Chinese kingship from the Shang and Zhou periods, offering a fundamental revision of Granet’s sociological interpretation. Where Granet had based his conclusions on mythological themes, Vandermeersch grounded his analysis in epigraphy, archaeology, and the study of social institutions — a methodological advance that reflected the progress of both Chinese and Western scholarship since Granet’s time. His later work, Le nouveau monde sinisé (1986), extended his analysis to the modern “Confucian” societies of East Asia, arguing that the process of “Sinicisation” was in large measure a process of “Confucianisation.”

The post-war decades also witnessed an efflorescence of Chinese literary studies in France that merits separate treatment. Three “hot spots” (points chauds) emerged between the 1950s and the 1980s. The first was classical poetry: Demiéville’s collaborative Anthologie de la poésie chinoise classique (1962), together with studies by Jacques Pimpaneau on Sima Xiangru, Donald Holzman on Xi Kang and Ruan Ji, and Cheng Chi-hsien’s structuralist analyses of Tang poetry, pushed French scholarship to the forefront of the field. Cheng’s application of Western semiotics to Chinese poetic concepts such as xu/shi (empty/full) and yin/yang opened new methodological avenues.

The second hot spot was the full-length translation of the great classical novels. The French translations of Xiyou ji (1957), Shuihu zhuan (1979), Hongloumeng (1981), and Jin Ping Mei (1985) brought the masterpieces of Chinese fiction to French readers for the first time in their entirety. The Hongloumeng translation by Li Zhihua, a Chinese-born scholar at the Université de Paris VIII, occupied twenty-seven years of labour and was admitted to the prestigious “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” series — the French literary canon’s equivalent of canonisation. Chen Qinghao, a Chinese-born scholar at the Université de Paris VII, simultaneously published critical editions of the Zhiyan zhai commentary that made original contributions to international hongxue (Red Studies).

The third hot spot was modern and contemporary Chinese literature, driven by the translation of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, and Ding Ling from the 1970s onward. Lu Xun was the gateway figure: Mme Ruhlmann’s preface to Polémique et satire was called “the first comprehensive assessment” of Lu Xun in French; François Jullien’s study of Lu Xun explored the symbolism of his literary imagery; and throughout the decade, translated volumes of Lu Xun’s stories, essays, and prose poems appeared almost annually.[^fn_litfr]

7. Contemporary French Sinology: EFEO, EHESS, and the Collège de France Today

French sinology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has maintained its distinctive character — a commitment to philological rigour, a preference for deep engagement with primary sources, and a tradition of humanistic breadth — while adapting to the changed world of global China studies.

The institutional infrastructure of French sinology remains among the most elaborate in Europe. The Collège de France continues to hold chairs dedicated to Chinese studies, though the specific denominations have changed to reflect new research priorities. The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), founded in 1898 with its original base in Hanoi, maintains research centres across Asia and continues to produce fundamental work in archaeology, epigraphy, religious studies, and textual scholarship. The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) has become a major centre for the social-scientific study of China, housing scholars who work on contemporary politics, economics, and society as well as on historical topics. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) supports numerous research projects and positions in Chinese studies, and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO, formerly the École des Langues Orientales) continues to train students in Chinese language and culture.

The great research libraries of Paris — the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Guimet, the libraries of the Collège de France and the EFEO — hold collections of Chinese books, manuscripts, and art that rank among the finest in the world, built on the foundations laid by the Jesuit missionaries of the eighteenth century.

The T’oung Pao, co-founded in 1890 by the Dutch sinologist Gustav Schlegel and the French bibliographer Henri Cordier, remains one of the three most authoritative sinological journals in the world (alongside the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Journal of Asian Studies). Published in English, French, and German, and jointly edited by scholars from Leiden and Paris, it embodies the international and philological character of the European sinological tradition. The Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (founded 1901), the Journal Asiatique (founded 1822), and the Brill series Leiden Studies in Sinology all continue to publish fundamental research.

The devastation of French sinology during the Second World War cannot be overstated. The three scholars who had dominated the field since the 1920s — Pelliot, Maspero, and Granet — died within five years of each other. The war also severed the Franco-Chinese scholarly exchanges that had sustained the EFEO and the Beijing-based Sino-French research centres. When Demiéville assumed leadership of the field after 1945, he faced the task of rebuilding virtually from scratch.

Yet recovery was swift. Demiéville’s own scholarly authority, combined with the institutional resilience of the Collège de France, the EFEO, and the CNRS, provided a framework for renewal. The recognition of the People’s Republic of China by France in 1964 — one of the first Western nations to do so — opened new opportunities for scholarly exchange. A cohort of young French scholars travelled to China in the 1960s, and many of them later became the leaders of the discipline. This generation included Anne Cheng, Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Marie-Claire Bergère, and Lucien Bianco, among others.

The post-war period also saw a broadening of the disciplinary base of French sinology. Whereas the pre-war tradition had been overwhelmingly philological and historical, the post-war generation embraced the social sciences — political science, economics, sociology, anthropology — as legitimate approaches to the study of China. This did not mean the abandonment of the philological tradition; rather, it meant that French sinology could now address the full range of questions posed by the emergence of the People’s Republic as a major world power. The creation of the Contemporary China Institute at EHESS, and the expansion of the CNRS’s China-related research programmes, institutionalised this new breadth of approach.[^fn_postwar]

Contemporary French sinology is marked by both continuity and new directions. The study of Chinese religion — Daoism, Buddhism, and popular religion — remains a particular strength, building on the pioneering work of Maspero, Demiéville, and Kristofer Schipper (the Dutch-born scholar who held a chair at both the EPHE in Paris and Leiden, and who spent eight years as a practising Daoist priest in Taiwan in order to understand Daoist ritual from the inside). The monumental Projet Tao-tsang — an analytical catalogue of the entire Daoist canon — was led by Schipper under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and involved scholars from seven countries.

Literary studies have flourished, with scholars such as François Jullien and Anne Cheng bringing Chinese philosophical and literary texts into dialogue with Western traditions. Cheng’s appointment to the Collège de France in 2008, to a chair of “Intellectual History of China,” was itself a landmark, reflecting both the continued centrality of the Collège de France to the discipline and the growing internationalisation of French sinology.

The study of modern and contemporary China has expanded greatly since the 1960s, driven by the political transformations in China itself. The work of Marie-Claire Bergère on the Chinese bourgeoisie, Lucien Bianco on peasant movements, and Marianne Bastid-Bruguière on education has enriched the understanding of twentieth-century China. The EHESS and Sciences Po have become important centres for the study of contemporary Chinese politics, economics, and society.

The study of Chinese philosophy has been a continuous thread in French sinology, running from Rémusat’s early translations of Daoist texts through Granet’s sociological interpretations to the sophisticated comparative work of the late twentieth century. Gernet’s Chine et christianisme (1982) — a study of the Chinese intellectual response to Jesuit Christianity — demonstrated that Chinese and European thought systems operated on such fundamentally different assumptions that genuine mutual comprehension was far more difficult than either side had imagined. His analysis of the “categories of thought” that separated Chinese from European civilisation influenced a generation of scholars.

François Jullien (born 1951) carried this comparative project further, developing an original philosophical method that used Chinese thought not as an object of study but as a vantage point from which to examine the unexamined presuppositions of Western philosophy. His works — including Procès ou création: Une introduction à la pensée des lettrés chinois (1989), Éloge de la fadeur (1991), and Traité de l’efficacité (1996) — provoked intense debate both within and beyond sinological circles. Critics questioned whether Jullien’s China was the real China or a philosophical construction; his defenders argued that the encounter between Chinese and Western thought was itself productive of new philosophical insight, regardless of the accuracy of the sinological detail.

Anne Cheng (born 1955), the first woman to hold a chair dedicated to China at the Collège de France (2008), represented a different approach to Chinese philosophy — one rooted in meticulous textual scholarship rather than comparative speculation. Her critical edition and translation of the Lunyu (Entretiens de Confucius, 1981) and her study of Han-dynasty Confucianism (Étude sur le confucianisme Han, 1985) demonstrated that philological rigour and philosophical sensitivity were not mutually exclusive. Her appointment to the Collège de France was itself a symbolic event, affirming the continuity of the tradition that had begun with Rémusat nearly two centuries earlier.[^fn_philo]

The history of French sinology, from the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century to the scholars of the twenty-first, displays a remarkable coherence. The Collège de France chair, established in 1814 and occupied by an unbroken succession of distinguished scholars — Rémusat, Julien, d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, Chavannes, Maspero, Demiéville, Gernet — embodies the continuity of the tradition. The emphasis on philological mastery, on exhaustive annotation, on the close reading of primary texts — what Honey calls the “commentarial tradition” — has remained the hallmark of French sinology even as the discipline has expanded to embrace the social sciences, archaeology, and the study of contemporary China.

Zhang Xiping, surveying the history of French sinology from the Chinese scholarly perspective, concludes that the French tradition has been characterised by “steady and solid work” (稳打稳扎), “diligent cultivation” (勤耕勤耘), and “a spirit of single-minded sincerity” (一片愚诚) — qualities that have enabled it to maintain its position as one of the world’s leading centres of sinological research despite the rise of American, Japanese, and Chinese scholarship.

The succession of scholars who held the Collège de France chair — Rémusat (1814–1832), Julien (1832–1873), d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1874–1892), Chavannes (1893–1918), Maspero (1921–1945), Demiéville (1945–1964), Gernet (1975–1992), and their successors — constitutes one of the most distinguished intellectual lineages in the history of any academic discipline. Each generation built upon the foundations laid by its predecessors while extending the reach of the field in new directions. Rémusat opened the door to professional sinology; Julien translated the canonical texts; Chavannes established the philological method; Pelliot and Maspero brought it to perfection; Granet introduced the social sciences; Demiéville rebuilt after catastrophe; Gernet and his contemporaries engaged with both classical China and the modern world.

The legacy of the Collège de France tradition is not merely a body of published works, however impressive. It is a model of scholarship: the conviction that the study of Chinese civilisation demands the same philological rigour, the same depth of linguistic training, and the same breadth of humanistic vision that have traditionally been brought to the study of Greece and Rome. This conviction, first articulated by Rémusat and embodied in the work of Chavannes, Pelliot, and Maspero, remains the animating principle of French sinology today.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. 4 vols. Paris, 1735.
• Chavannes, Édouard. Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien. 5 vols. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1895–1905.
• Chavannes, Édouard. Le T’ai Chan: Essai de monographie d’un culte chinois. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910.
• Chavannes, Édouard, and Paul Pelliot. “Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine.” Journal Asiatique (1911).
• Demiéville, Paul. Choix d’études sinologiques (1921–1970). Leiden: Brill, 1973.
• Granet, Marcel. Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1919.
• Granet, Marcel. La civilisation chinoise. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1929.
• Granet, Marcel. La pensée chinoise. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1934.
• Maspero, Henri. La Chine antique. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1927.
• Pelliot, Paul. Notes on Marco Polo. 3 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale / Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1959–1973.
• Rémusat, Jean-Pierre Abel. Éléments de la grammaire chinoise. Paris, 1822.

Secondary Sources

• Demiéville, Paul. “Aperçu historique des études sinologiques en France.” Reprinted in Choix d’études sinologiques. Leiden: Brill, 1973.
• Honey, David B. Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. American Oriental Series 86. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001.
• Zhang Xiping 张西平, ed. Oumei hanxue de lishi yu xianzhuang 欧美汉学的历史与现状 (History and Current State of European and American Sinology). Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2005.
• Zhang Xiping 张西平. “Lecture 7: Development of French Sinology” (第七讲：法国汉学的发展). In Lectures on the History of Western Sinology.
• Cordier, Henri. Bibliotheca Sinica. 5 vols. Paris, 1904–1924.
• Freches, José. La Sinologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975.
• He Yin 何寅 and Xu Guanghua 许光华. Guowai hanxueshi 国外汉学史 (History of Sinology Abroad). Shanghai: Shanghai Waiyu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2002.
• Mungello, David E. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1985.
• Xu Minglong 许明龙. Huang Jialüe yu zaoqi Faguo hanxue 黄嘉略与早期法国汉学 (Arcade Hoang and Early French Sinology). Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2004.

References

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