Paul Rivet
Paul Rivet ( born May 7, 1876 in Wasigny in the Ardennes, † March 21, 1958 in Paris) was a French anthropologist and physician. He was co-founder of the Ethnological Museum Musée de l' Homme, which is housed in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.
Professional activity
Paul Rivet studied at the national military medical university of Lyon and received his doctorate in medicine in 1897. In 1901, he received an offer to join as a physician, the French geodesic mission that went to Ecuador with more accurate methods and more precise instruments take -led de la Condamine, Louis Godin and Pierre Bouguer 1735-1745 work again. The aim was to measure the length of an arc of the meridian at a certain proximity to the equator. Upon completion of this mission, he remained for six years in South America and watched the residents of lying between the Andean valleys. Back in Paris, he was an assistant at the Muséum national d' histoire naturelle and worked his South American studies. His records were 1912-1922, together with works by René Verneau, the former director of the museum, in two parts, under the title ethnography ancienne de l' Equateur (ancient ethnography of Ecuador) published.
1926 worked with Paul Rivet in the founding of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris, which he ran together with Marcel Mauss and on which he was one of the first professors. In 1928, he succeeds René Verneau and was director of the Museum of Ethnography of the Trocadéro (MET), which belonged to the Muséum national d' histoire naturelle. In 1937, the MET became the Musée de l' Homme, which was built in the occasion of the World Exhibition in Paris, Palais de Chaillot was housed.
In his theoretical works Rivet asserts not only that the cradle of the American people is Asia, but also that the migration emanated from Australia 6000 years ago, and a short time later of Melanesia. His main work origins of the American People, published in 1943, contains linguistic and anthropological arguments that seek to prove his theory of migration.
In 1945 he returned to Paris and resumed his teaching at the Musée de l' Homme, where he continued his research on South America. His linguistic work provided new insights into the Aymara and Quechua. Paul Rivet also joined family ties with Ecuador. He had 1923 Mercedes Andrade Chiriboga ( 1877-1973 ) married, the mother of three children and was descended from the upper class of society. Rivet had met in Cuenca, and in 1906 he went to Paris with her. His ties with the South American continent led him to found institutions such as La Maison de l' Amérique latine, and together with Paul Duarte l'Institut français des Hautes études brésilienne. Finally, it was opened with his help at the Sorbonne, the Institut des Hautes Études de l' Amérique latine, where he organized numerous conferences.
Civil commitment
In his life, Paul Rivet also showed moral courage. On 5 March 1934 he founded, together with the philosopher Alain and the physicist Paul Langevin le Comité de vigilance of intellectuels antifascistes. On 12 May 1935 he was elected as the only candidate from the left to the city council of Paris.
In June 1940, Paul Rivet hung at the entrance of the Musée de l' Homme as a sign of protest against the truce with the German Reich a poster with the poem " If - " by Rudyard Kipling on which he had published in 1910. André Maurois translated this poem in 1918 under the title " Tu seras un homme mon fils " ( "You'll be a man, my son "). On July 14, 1940 Rivet addressed an open letter to Philippe Pétain, in which he wrote: " Dear Mr. Marshall, the country is not with you, France is no longer with you. " In October 1940, he was appointed by the Vichy government removed from his office, and he joined the resistance group of the Musée de l' Homme.
Persecuted by the Gestapo, he escaped at the last minute and he was able to reach in February 1941 he amicably minded Colombia, whose president Eduardo Santos received him with open arms. He participated in the founding of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and the creation of a museum in Bogotá. In 1943 he was cultural attaché of the Free French for Latin America in Mexico. There he managed to write the book origins of the American people, to which he thought long and which was published in Montreal.
Political tasks
After the liberation, he was elected as a socialist deputy to parliament. In 1948 he resigned from the Section Française de l' International ouvrière ( SFIO ) and endorsed progressiste the Union. He advocated negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, to keep French Indochina in the French Union. In July 1946 he left the conference of Fontainebleau, which ended with a failure of the French-Vietnamese negotiations. As an independent candidate, he lost in the parliamentary elections in June 1951, then retired from active politics. In June 1954, Paul Rivet resigned from the Union of progressiste because they voted for Prime Minister against the candidacy of radical socialists Pierre Mendès -France. The President René Coty appointed on June 17, 1954 Pierre Mendès -France prime minister.
Paul Rivet employed then the future of Algeria. On April 21, 1956, he signed in the newspaper Le Monde "L' Appel pour le salut et le renouveau de L' Algérie française " ( "call to salvation and the renewal of French Algeria "). He was of the view that it could lead to the inevitable Algerian independence, rather than immediately only progressive. At the request of Guy Mollet he defended the French positions on Algeria to the UN and the countries of South America.
Paul Rivet was also a member of the French League for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights, President of the Conseil supérieur de la radio diffusion and President of the French Commission for UNESCO.
Bibliography
- Christine Laurière: Paul Rivet: le savant et le politique. Publications scientifiques du Muséum national d' histoire naturelle, Paris, 2008, ISBN 978-2-85653-615-5. (collection Archives 12)
- Anthropologist
- Ethnologist
- Resistance fighters
- Member of the National Assembly (France)
- Frenchman
- Born 1876
- Died in 1958
- Man