Michel-Ange-André Le Roux Deshauterayes
Michel-Ange-André Le Roux Deshauterayes (10 September 1724 – 9 February 1795) was a French orientalist and professor of Arabic at the Collège Royal.
Biography
Michel-Ange-André Le Roux Deshauterayes was born in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. The nephew of Étienne and Michel Fourmont, he began studying oriental languages at an early age, particularly Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Chinese, with his uncle Étienne.
At the age of eighteen, he was admitted to the École des enfants de langues, which had been attached to the Collège Louis-le-Grand since the turn of the century, but was allowed to continue living with his uncle. When his uncle died in 1745, Deshauterayes joined the Royal Library as an interpreter. In 1752, he took over the Arabic chair vacated by Pétis de La Croix at the Collège Royal.
After thirty-two years in office, he resigned in 1784 and retired to Rueil-Malmaison, where he remained until his death.
Works
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Deshauterayes published very little in his own name. Modest by nature, he seems to have studied more for his own satisfaction than to deliver the fruit of his labors to the public.
He was the first in Europe[1] to draw a "Manchu alphabet",[lower-alpha 1] a reproduction of which appears in one of the volumes of plates in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, where other alphabets drawn by him also appeared, as well as an extract from one of his memoirs.[lower-alpha 2] He also supervised the printing of the twelve-volume edition of the General History of China, compiled in Peking by Father Moyriac de Mailla and published in Paris by Abbé Grosier between 1777 and 1783, to which he also contributed numerous notes and revisions.
In 1747, with Joseph de Guignes, also a pupil of Étienne Fourmont, he published an Abrégé de la vie et des ouvrages de M. Fourmont. Later, in reply to a Mémoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une colonie égyptienne by the same Joseph de Guignes, he published an opuscule refuting it: this literary dispute may well have helped to keep him away from the Académie des Inscriptions, to which his erudition allowed him to aspire. In 1755, a Lettre à M. Desflottes sur l'histoire véritable de l'enfant chinois de la maison de Tchao, written by Deshauterayes, was printed after The Orphan of China, a tragedy by Voltaire, with whom he corresponded.
Finally, in 1775, he published a prospectus announcing the publication of a work entitled Triomphe de l'Église dans la destruction de Jérusalem et du Temple (Triumph of the Church in the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple).[lower-alpha 3] In it, Deshauterayes put forward the thesis that the Apocalypse becomes intelligible when we know that it was originally written in Syriac, in the highly figurative style of oriental languages, and that the prophecies it contains relate, not to the end of time, but to events occurring between the birth of Christ and the capture of Jerusalem by Titus. Thus, the famous number of the beast referred, according to him, to the emperor Caligula; if the apostle John felt he had to disguise it in this way, it was because he feared it would bring further misfortune upon the Christians.[lower-alpha 4] This work never saw the light of day.
Notes
Footnotes
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- ↑ Klaproth, Julius von (1815). Lettres sur la littérature mandchou, traduites du russe de M. Afanasii Larionowitch Leontiew. Paris: Imprimerie de Fain, p. 24.
- ↑ Deshauterayes' note in Histoire générale de la Chine, Vol. IX, p. 311.
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