Gaston Paris

Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris (9 August 1839 – 5 March 1903) was a French writer and scholar. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902 and 1903.

Paris was born at Avenay (Marne), the son of Paulin Paris (Alexis Paulin Paris b. 25 March 1800; d. 13 February 1881), an important scholar of medieval French literature. In his childhood, Gaston learned to appreciate Old French romances as poems and stories, and this early impulse for the study of Romance literature was placed on a solid basis by courses of study at Bonn (1856) and at the École des chartes.

Paris taught French grammar in a private school, later succeeding 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 Académie française; in 1895 he was appointed director of the Collège de France. He 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. He contributed largely to the Histoire littéraire de la France, and with Paul Meyer published Romania, a journal devoted to the study of Romance literature.

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