Alexis Paulin Paris (Avenay 1800 – Paris 1881) was schooled in Reims, and during his law studies in Paris devoted most of his time to literature. In 1824 he published an Apologie de l’Ecole Romantique, in which he advocated the imitation of Byron and the study of medieval art. Paris also translated Byron’s complete works (13 vols, Paris 1827-32). In 1828 he obtained a clerkship in the manuscript department of the Royal (now National) Library, where he pursued his medievalist interests.
In 1831, the combination of Romantic taste and literary medievalism led to a spat with Michelet and Quinet, whose ministerial report on 12th-century French epics had argued, on Michelet’s authority, for the Celtic origin of Breton-based romances like Tristan and Perceval. Paris rebutted this by claiming a native French origin in his Lettre à M. Michelet sur les épopées du Moyen Âge (1831). It was only after Price’s and Schulz’s prize essays at the Abergavenny eisteddfods of the 1820s and 1830s had confirmed the argument for a Welsh-Breton origin of the matière de Bretagne, or at least its Arthurian core corpus, that Paris would revise his views.
Text editions of Berte aux Grans Piés and Garin le Loherain appeared in 1831 and 1835, and a collection of ballads appeared in 1833 under the Romantic-Iberian title Romancero Français. Further publications in literary history appeared after Paris had succeeded Raynouard as member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. He then turned to historical writings, publishing the Grandes chroniques de Saint Denis (1836-40) and his extensively commented survey of Les manuscrits français de la Bibliothèque du Roi (1836-48). This work was undertaken as part of his involvement in the ongoing Histoire littéraire de la France.
In 1853 a chair of medieval literature was created for him at the Collège de France, where for the next 19 years he gave courses on the origins of the French language, the chansons de Geste and matière de Bretagne, and early French theatre. Paris aimed to reach a large readership rather than practising an austere method. This attitude became a nationally French one: at the time, medieval material was hotly contested as to its French or German(ic) origins, with the latter model being predominantly asserted by German-based scholars of the austere “critical” Grimm/Lachmann school. Against this, Paris asserted the French origin and character of the medieval texts and a less ponderous, more legible way of editing them. Against Grimm’s Reinhart Fuchs, he edited his Aventures de Maître Renart et d’Ysengrin in 1861. He resigned his chair at the Collège de France in 1872 and died in 1881.
His son was the great medievalist Gaston Paris.
