Reading Chinese in 19th-century Paris
- Pacôme Sébastien
- May 29
- 9 min read
Introduction
For Europeans seeking to understand China, reading Chinese has been arguably the most widespread – if not the most challenging – form of intellectual engagement. A recent historiographical trend, led by the historian Clément Fabre, explores the following question through the eyes of 19th-century Parisians: how did they read Chinese and produce knowledge for the Old Continent about the Middle Kingdom?
The reader’s reception depends on their time, place, purpose, preconceptions, attentions, and expectations – rather than solely on the writer’s intention. Traditionally, capturing the author’s intention has often been regarded as the legitimate reading practice. However, Fabre explains that reading to capture the author’s intention only corresponds to one of several ways to engage with Chinese texts.
Indeed, Fabre contends that three main approaches to reading Chinese unfolded in the 19th-century. This article seeks to unpack Fabre’s work, with the broader goal of introducing his research to an English-speaking audience (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020). According to Fabre, the first approach to reading Chinese is a systemic one, inherited from previous European research. This manner, carried out by linguists, intended to place the Chinese language within a broader linguistic hierarchy, placing its level of sophistication beneath that of the European classical languages. The second type of reading is academic, involving thorough textual contextualisation to reveal classical references, meanings, and literary techniques engineered by the author. This work was carried out by sinologists. The third involves dissenting, non-scientific readings – for creation or inspiration – by poets and art lovers. I suggest a fourth manner, often overlooked: reading Chinese as a tool to access and assess social practices, forming an early sociological approach within sinology.
This study of reading focuses on Paris, where, since the creation of the first European chair for Chinese language and civilisation at the Collège de France in 1814, remained the beating-heart of study and teaching of Chinese language. This situation lasted until the French school of the Far East was created in 1898 and a chair of Chinese was installed in Lyon in 1900. Despite this shift, important developments in Chinese readings were still taking place in Paris in the early 20th century. Accordingly, the spatiotemporal framework of this study will be set in 1814 to 1910 Paris.
An Early Controversy & Systemic Reading
The first type of Chinese reading, systemic reading, is also the earliest according to Fabre. He draws on the Abel-Rémusat-von Humboldt controversy to develop this category. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788-1832), who obtained the first European chair of Chinese language and civilisation in 1814, faced two main opponents, the missionaries and von Humboldt–both strong proponents of systematic reading.
Abel-Rémusat rejects the studies of the 18th century missionaries who were seeking to either uncover traces of an original, even universal language through Chinese, or trying to find evidence of an ancient Christianity among the Chinese. This type of reading remained in minority.
Another approach, similar to the missionaries’ view in its reading of the Chinese language as a systematic and reified system, in the field of linguistics, is seen in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argumentative response to Abel-Rémusat from 1821 to 1831. Von Humboldt argued in favour of the superiority of inflected languages, such as ancient Greek and Latin. According to him, these inflected languages were better able to situate statements in fundamental relationships (mainly of time and space) with the world, and thus to better correspond to the reality languages aimed to describe. For instance, von Humboldt criticised the fact that Chinese grammar does not modify words according to their grammatical function or their position in the sentence, which hinders the construction of long sentences more propitious to free and elaborate thought.
Abel-Rémusat put forward a counter-argument: the Chinese language, supposedly without grammar, has nevertheless recorded high-level cultural achievements, which challenged the idea that only grammatically inflected languages were capable of such accomplishments. In response, and in order to maintain the exceptionalism of classical languages, von Humboldt extended the notion of grammatical inflection to logic. This approach recognised a structural or mental grammar – not clearly observable in the Chinese language – but still capable of expressing statements that convey fundamental relations and correspond satisfactorily to the reality it aims to depict. In this way, he acknowledged a specific perfection in Chinese. However, for von Humboldt, compared to Latin for example, the Chinese reader has less freedom of creation since less detail and flexion are provided.
This is where Abel-Rémusat grew wary of systemic interpretations, which he feared could caricature the Chinese language. Instead, he proposed a more relativistic and practical approach. His suggestion involved simply focusing on the mechanism of the Chinese language and the meaning of texts, rather than seeking a religious, philosophical or linguistic order. Abel-Rémusat, therefore, contributed to a shift towards a more scientific reading of Chinese, and advocated a more scientific approach based on textual contextualisation and classical reference analysis, meanings, and literary techniques.
Reading Chinese as a 19th-century Academic
The scientific approach to reading Chinese gained dominance throughout the 19th century. Compared to other languages, reading Chinese for research purposes involved a two-pronged specificity: it required specific reading paraphernalia and, according to Fabre, induced a unique engagement of the senses.
The paraphernalia included Western language learning tools (dictionaries, textbooks, grammars, bilingual translations), and, unsurprisingly, Chinese scholarship (exegeses, commentaries, studies, critical editions, annotations of classical texts). More unexpectedly, Fabre notes that some Sinologists, such as Stanislas Julien (1797-1873), professor at the Collège de France and successor of the chair held by Abel-Rémusat, used Manchu as a proxy for the Chinese text. Manchu versions of Chinese materials helped sinologists to better understand Chinese texts because, unlike Chinese, Manchu is an alphabetical language, possessing case marks and verbal inflections. Théodore Pavie, also a student of Stanislas Julien, translated the story of The Three Kingdoms with the help of a Manchu edition.
Sinologists went beyond comparing different versions of the same text; they sought to embrace the networks of texts that shed light on the work they focused on, highlighting the importance of transtextuality, defined as everything that links one text to others. The sinologist Edouard Chavannes, in his introduction of the partial translation of the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, mainly portrayed this study as a compilation of earlier historical texts. Historical scholarship, according to Chavannes, was considered by the Chinese to fall into a sort of public domain, and Sima Qian was not even obliged to cite the authors. He was only obliged to faithfully copy these texts, visible above all in the diversity of styles and prior knowledge of the classics. As a result, the reader was supposed to focus less on the original author’s intention (as was the case in France) and more on identifying the landscape of references.
Yet the most distinctive aspect of reading Chinese lies in its physical solicitation: visual, sound and semantic. Indeed, French sinologists and intellectuals were captivated by the visual dimension of Chinese writing, often treating it as a kind of ideographic or pictorial system. Scholars like Abel-Rémusat, Farjenel or Victor Segalen read characters not just for meaning but as visual-poetic symbols – seeing in them images that mirrored natural scenes or emotional states, like "the autumn of the heart" to express melancholy. However, sinologists were not merely reading the text visually – they also paid close attention to its sound and musicality. Hervey de Saint-Denys even noted how the rhythm and tone of Chinese verses, for instance in the Li Sao (離騷, Lí Sāo), created a sung harmony that balanced out visual irregularities in line length.
This aesthetic distinctiveness of the Chinese language influenced how meaning was perceived. French sinologists saw Chinese as being rooted in relational meaning and poetic conciseness rather than grammatical precision. Von Humboldt, Abel-Rémusat, and Farjenel described Chinese writing as ideographic – where meaning emerges from suggestive images rather than fixed grammatical categories. Reading Chinese, they argued, relied on intuitive and holistic recognition of meaning, rather than linear parsing – a process likened to a kind of poetic reverie. In the words of Saint-Denis, the reader "sings as he reads" and delights in ambiguity rather than clarity.
Dissenting Reading
While sinologists sought to define and contain the proper ways of reading Chinese, Paris also became a space for more unorthodox approaches – especially among poets and art lovers, who did not necessarily reject sinological authority but refused to be confined by it. Figures like Albert Jacquemart, though outside the academic field, became key authorities on Chinese inscriptions in the art market, focusing not on meaning or pronunciation, but on visual criteria such as layout, line quality, stylistic markers of age. Calligraphy was read and appreciated more for how it looked than for what it said.
In literary circles, a different kind of appropriation emerged. Poets like Segalen engaged with Chinese writing as pure visual presence – not something to be sounded out or translated, but rather contemplated: “They do not express; they mean; they are.” he wrote, collapsing language into being. Others, more pragmatic, looked to Chinese for creative inspiration: Judith Gautier and Louis Bouilhet, for instance, played with characters as symbolic assemblages, projecting imaginary etymologies that gave rise to new poetic associations. These experiments were frequently grounded in a reductive, ideographic conception of Chinese, but they opened up other modes of reading: speculative, associative, material – and ultimately resistant to the disciplinary borders drawn by sinology.
A Sociological Intuition
With the publication of his study on the Mount Tai (泰山,Tài Shān) in 1910, Chavannes marked a shift in reading Chinese texts, where they were now perceived less as vessels of hidden philosophical content, and more as sources for reconstructing social practices and material conditions. His approach, shaped by a certain sociological intuition, claims the same scientific legitimacy as contextual reading, while redefining the object of analysis. Rather than seeking the (perhaps inaccessible) authorial intention, the text becomes a gateway to observable facts and lived rituals.
The originality of Chavannes’ reading lies not only in this reorientation of focus, but in his treatment of sources also. In this approach, classical texts no longer hold interpretative hegemony. In his Tai Shan study, Chinese is read through and against a wide array of materials: epigraphy (temples, monuments), illuminated manuscripts, popular prayers, images, statues, geographic data, even fieldwork – including two ascents of the mountain itself. These fragments are juxtaposed with canonical texts, not to reveal deeper meaning, but to ground a picture of ritual life as it was practiced.
In this way, Chavannes pushed reading beyond the stylistic and semantic concerns that shaped early sinology – especially Abel-Rémusat’s ideal of erudite interpretation – and toward a mode of reading that is at core documentary. One striking example is the “suicide wall” – a mundane, almost absurd piece of infrastructure in the mountain inscribed with the command not to jump off the cliff. Here, reading Chinese shifts from an interpretive act to an ethnographic method: a means to glimpse how people lived, believed, and, for this case, tried to govern despair.
Conclusion
Overall, two main academic ambitions can be contrasted by examining the reading practices of 19th-century French sinologists. On the one hand, contextual reading aimed to reconstruct the author's intention through the analysis of concepts, references, historical context, and semantics. On the other hand, a pre-sociological reading emerged, oriented toward social practices and material conditions – perhaps anticipating the institutionalisation of sociology in the early 20th century. Alongside these streams, secondary modes of reading treated Chinese either as a supposedly underdeveloped language due to its lack of formal grammar, or as a source of aesthetic inspiration for art and poetry.
Despite varied contexts, intellectual goals, and sources, all of these readers share one experience: the irreducible otherness of reading Chinese compared to French. This difference arises not only from the structural divergence of the language, but also from the desire to claim expert authority over a technical subject within a nascent human science: sinology.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pacôme Sébastien is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, ENS Paris, and Peking University. His research focuses on Chinese public spending and defence policy, especially in Republican China. He has contributed to academic and policy work in France, China, and India.
This article was edited by Daria Bogolyubova and George Banos.
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