Charles-François Dupuis (26 October 1742 – 29 September 1809) was a French historian of religion and politician.
A professor of Latin rhetoric at the Collège de France, he is best known for his work The Origin of All Religious Worship, published in 1795.
Elected to the National Convention, Dupuis participated in the creation of the French Republican calendar. Under the Directory, he served in the Council of Five Hundred, and later sat in the Corps législatif during the Consulate.
Under the Ancien Régime
Early life
Charles-François Dupuis was born on 26 October 1742 in Trie-Château, near Gisors, the son of Charles-Antoine Dupuis (1720–1760). His grandfather, Antoine Dupuis (d. 1732), was the village schoolmaster at Parnes, a parish within the Archdiocese of Rouen. His father, who taught at Trie-Château, married Clotilde Chouquet on 29 January 1742. They had three children: Charles-François, Marie-Madeleine (born 1744), and Jean-Antoine (born 1757). In 1753, the family settled in La Roche-Guyon, where his parents opened a boarding school for boys.
As a child, Dupuis developed a passion for surveying and geometry. Around 1755, while practising on the banks of the Seine with a graphometer and attempting to calculate the height of the keep of Château de La Roche-Guyon using the principles of trigonometry, he attracted the attention of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, lord of La Roche-Guyon. Impressed by the young boy's abilities, the Duke offered to send him to the prestigious Collège d'Harcourt on the rue de la Harpe in Paris.
In the autumn of 1759, after a brief period at the Collège Saint-Lazare in Vernon, Dupuis entered the Collège d'Harcourt at the age of eighteen (three years older than his classmates).
Selected to compete in the Concours général, he won first prize in Latin and second prize in Greek. On 10 August 1760, while travelling home for the holidays, his father drowned in the Seine after falling from the ferry crossing the Seine river between La Roche-Guyon and Moisson.
The Duke of La Rochefoucauld granted Dupuis a second scholarship, enabling him to continue his studies while supporting his family. Thomas-Gilles Asselin, principal of the Collège d'Harcourt, also exempted him from boarding fees.
Between 1760 and 1763, Dupuis received eighteen distinctions in the Concours général: five first prizes, six second prizes, six honourable mentions, and, at the end of his second year of rhetoric, the prestigious prix d'honneur.
He then began the five-year course of study (quinquennium) at the University of Paris, consisting of two years of philosophy followed by three years of theology. At the age of twenty-five, he took the newly established agrégation competitive examination.
Professor at the University of Paris
Having passed the agrégation in literature in 1767, Dupuis was appointed professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Lisieux in Paris, where he taught for the next twenty years.
He abandoned his theological studies, completed an accelerated course at the Paris Faculty of Law, and, in the summer of 1770, qualified as an avocat en parlement. During this period, he attended the lectures of the astronomer Jérôme Lalande at the Collège Royal.
In 1772, he permanently renounced the ecclesiastical habit – he was previously an acolyte – in order to marry Marie-Marguerite Bourbon (1751–1816). The couple had four children, all of whom died in early childhood.
In 1775, Dupuis delivered the address at the Concours général prize-giving ceremony before the Parlement of Paris, recently re-established by Louis XVI. Among the prizewinners were Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, who later became two prominent figures of the French Revolution.
Six years later, the rector of the University of Paris commissioned him to compose the funeral oration for the Empress Maria Theresa, mother of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Pioneer of Optical Telegraphy
In the spring of 1778, Dupuis developed an optical telegraph together with the geographer Jean-Baptiste Fortin. Drawing inspiration from the earlier experiments of Guillaume Amontons, they devised a signalling code based on the opening and closing of the shutters of Dupuis's apartment on the heights of Belleville. From Bagneux, Fortin observed the signals through a telescope and decoded the transmitted messages.
They communicated their work to the Secretary of State for War, hoping that it would be passed on to the American revolutionaries supported by France. Their proposal, however, came to nothing. Dupuis and Fortin are regarded as precursors of the semaphore telegraph developed by Claude Chappe during the French Revolution.
Historian of Religion Beginning in 1777, Dupuis developed the hermeneutic system that would make him famous. He argued that myths were originally allegorical representations of the movements of the celestial sphere and the succession of the seasons, with the deities and heroes of classical antiquity symbolizing heavenly bodies and constellations.
Between 1779 and 1780, he published three letters on the subject in the Journal des savants. His Memoir on the Origin of the Constellations and on the Explanation of Myth through Astronomy was included by Jérôme Lalande in the fourth volume of his Treatise on Astronomy in 1781.
Over the following years, Dupuis published further studies, including one on the yugas – the four ages of the world in Hindu cosmology – in the Mercure de France (14 June 1783), and others on Minerva and Janus.
In a letter dated 3 April 1786, Lalande urged the mathematician Johann III Bernoulli to "take a look" at Dupuis's articles, describing them as "the most curious thing ever accomplished in scholarly astronomy".
Dupuis became embroiled in a controversy with Jean Sylvain Bailly, who criticized his radical allegorical interpretation of mythology, and with the astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil, who accused him of contradicting Biblical chronology. Dupuis maintained that the zodiac, which he believed to be of Egyptian origin, had been devised when the vernal equinox lay in the constellation of Libra, approximately 14 000 BC. This conclusion, derived from the rate of the axial precession, extended far beyond the date traditionally assigned to the Creation.
His reputation as an unbeliever hindered his academic ambitions. Dupuis applied several times for election to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and despite the support of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, president of the French Academy of Sciences, he was repeatedly rejected because of the religious suspicions entertained by several members of the academy. He was nevertheless elected to the Royal Academy of Rouen in December 1785.
Invitation to Prussia
At this time, Frederick the Great was seeking a successor to Dieudonné Thiébault as professor of grammar at the military academy in Berlin. Nicolas de Condorcet recommended Dupuis to the king, and Dupuis was invited to settle in Prussia, where the publication of his works would have been financed.
However, he still lacked two years of service before becoming eligible for emeritus status and receiving a pension from the University of Paris. In the summer of 1786, the Marquis de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals of France, granted him a one-year exemption enabling him to qualify for his pension earlier, but the project was abandoned following the death of Frederick the Great.
On 4 September 1787, Baron de Breteuil, Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi, appointed Dupuis professor of Latin rhetoric at the Collège Royal. In December 1788, he was finally elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, however, Dupuis resumed his efforts to settle in Berlin, although these plans ultimately came to nothing.
French Revolution
In the spring of 1791, Dupuis was appointed by the Department of Paris, headed by the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as one of four commissioners for public instruction, alongside Quatremère de Quincy, Lacretelle, and Gallois. Together, they signed the first official report recommending the conversion of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève into a "sepulchral prytaneion" – the future Panthéon.
His responsibilities included purging educational institutions of refractory priests and royalist sympathizers, replacing them with men supportive of the Revolution.
Residing on rue de la Harpe, Dupuis belonged to the same revolutionary section of Paris as Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Jean-Paul Marat.
In the aftermath of the demonstration of 20 June 1792, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld unsuccessfully ordered the arrest of Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, the mayor of the Commune of Paris, and was forced to resign as president of the Department. Following the insurrection of 10 August 1792, a warrant was issued for La Rochefoucauld's arrest. He subsequently became one of the victims of the September Massacres. The death of his patron prompted Dupuis to seek refuge near Évreux, in Louviers, at the home of his friend Antoine Letellier.
National Convention On 15 September 1792, Dupuis was elected first substitute deputy for Seine-et-Oise to the National Convention, replacing Bertrand Barère, who had chosen to represent the Hautes-Pyrénées. He was appointed commissioner for the issuance of assignats on 26 September, substitute member of the Committee of Decrees on 11 October, and a member of the Committee of Public Instruction (7 November) and the Committee of Finance (13 November).
On 15 January 1793, during the Trial of Louis XVI, the deputies voted by roll call on the guilt of the deposed king, who stood accused of “conspiring against public liberty and attacking the general security of the State.” Dupuis voted to find him guilty. Three days later, when the Convention voted on the sentence, he declared: “I will not cast my vote to deprive the people of an important hostage whom they may one day have the right to demand of you. I therefore vote for detention.”
Following the vote in favour of the death penalty, Dupuis supported the amendment calling for a stay of execution, declaring: “I hope that the decision of the majority will bring happiness to my fellow citizens, and it will do so only if it can withstand the severe judgment of Europe and of posterity, who will judge both the king and his judges.” The motion was defeated, and Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January.
As a member of the Committee of Public Instruction, Dupuis participated in the work leading to the creation of the French Republican calendar, alongside Lagrange, Monge, Pingré, Lalande, and Guyton de Morveau. On 17 September 1793, the committee's rapporteur, Gilbert Romme, presented the calendar to the National Convention. Inspired by ancient Egypt, it consisted of twelve months of three ten-day weeks, supplemented by five or six "Sansculottides", and began at the september equinox of 1792, the day of the abolition of the monarchy and the beginning of the “French Era”. It came into force on 6 October 1793.
Although Dupuis opposed the arrest of the Girondins and voted on 28 May 1793 to retain the Commission of Twelve, he adopted a deliberately cautious silence during the Reign of Terror. In November 1793, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, prosecutor of the Paris Commune, appointed him curator of historical monuments.
He was unable to prevent the execution of his longtime friend Antoine Letellier, who was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 24 June 1794 for his Girondin sympathies.