Camille Latreille

Camille Latreille (8 August 1870 – 2 January 1927) was a French academic and man of letters. His works on Chateaubriand, Lamartine, de Maistre, and on the Little Church of Lyon, made him known as a historian of ideas and religious sentiment.

Biography

Camille Latreille was born at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche, (in the Isère department), a small village in the Bas-Dauphiné where his parents owned a grocery store. Noticed by Father Caillat, the parish priest, he was sent to the Saint-Maurice college in Vienne, then to the Lycée in Lyon, where he won first prize in physics in the general competition, ahead of his fellow student and friend Jean Baptiste Perrin.

His principal got him a scholarship to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure at the newly opened Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. He failed the competitive examination, and returned to Lyon, where he enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Letters — which allowed Jean Perrin to address him later, at the time of his nomination for the Nobel Prize, this kind compliment: "This time, and because you have abandoned the sciences, you have left me take the first place."

After a degree in literature, he passed the competitive examination for the agrégation, was appointed professor at the Lycée du Puy, then at the Lycée de Lyon, and at the same time undertook an intense research activity. In 1899, he presented a doctoral thesis entitled François Ponsard et la fin du théâtre romantique. The following year he married Julie Burle, daughter of an industrialist from Vienne, with whom he had 6 children.

From 1903 onwards, having settled permanently in Lyon, he published numerous works, including Joseph de Maistre et la Papauté, which was awarded a prize by the French Academy and which opened the doors of the Academy of Lyon. In 1911 he was a professor of "higher rhetoric" at the Lycée in the chair inaugurated by Edouard Herriot. The following year he was appointed to the Faculty of Letters in Lyon, where he taught until his health no longer allowed him to do so. In 1925, he published three more works on the life and writings of Lamartine. The same year he was elected mayor of Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche, his birthplace, where he kept a house.

He died in Lyon on January 2, 1927, at the age of 56. He is buried in Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche.

Works

• La Fin du Théâtre Romantique et François Ponsard (1899)
• De Petro Boessatio (1603-1662), ac de conditione litteratirum virorum in Delphinatu eadem ætate (1899)
• Pierre de Boissat (1603-1662) et le mouvement littéraire en Dauphiné (1900)
• Lettres Inédites de Sainte-Beuve à Collombet (1903; with Mario Roustan)
• Lyon Contre Paris après 1830. Le Mouvement de Décentralisation Littéraire et Artistique (1905; with Mario Roustan)
• Chateaubriand: Études Biographiques et Littéraires. Le Romantisme à Lyon (1905)
• Joseph de Maistre et la Papauté (1906; awarded the Prix Bordin by the Académie française in 1916)
• Francisque Bouillier, le Dernier des Cartésiens; avec des Lettres Inédites de Victor Cousin (1907)
• L'Opposition Religieuse au Concordat de 1792 à 1802 (1910; awarded the Prix Thérouanne by the Académie française in 1911)
• Après le Concordat. L'Opposition de 1803 jusqu'à nos jours (1910)
• La Petite Eglise de Lyon. L'opposition religieuse au Concordat (1911)
• Charles de Sainte-Foy. Souvenirs de Jeunesse (1830-1835) (1911; with Mario Roustan)
• Victor de Laprade (1812-1882) (1912)
• Un Ami de Victor de Laprade. Le Poète Polonais Constantin Gaszinski (1918)
• Les Dernières Années de Lamartine (1852-1869) (1925; awarded the Prix Marcelin-Guérin by the Académie française in 1926)
• La Mère de Lamartine (1925)

Selected publications

• "La Querelle Universitaire à Lyon (1838-1849)," Revue d'Histoire de Lyon, Vol. IV (1904; with Mario Roustan)
• "Joseph de Maistre et le Tsar Alexandre Ier," Revue Hebdomadaire (1918)
• "Lamartine et la Syrie," Revue Hebdomadaire (1919)

External links

• Works by Camille Latreille at Gallica