Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg

The French intellectual, writer and clergyman Charles Étienne Brasseur (1814-1874) through his work in Mesoamerica has left a complex legacy. His archaeological fieldwork, as well as his diligent collection, discovery and publication of written materials, have proved to be very useful for subsequent Mesoamerican researchers and scholars. On the other hand, the interpretations and theories this nineteenth century researcher had advanced have proven to be mostly inaccurate, and indeed have been very misleading. 

He was born in Bourbourg near Dunkirk  into a family of local entrepreneurs connected to the local political or judicial elite. As a boy he was able to spend long periods of time devouring travel literature and other books in the impressive library of Alexandre Nicolas Muchembled, the son of his godmother and other families which were instrumental in mapping out the course of his life to come. He studied theology in Ghent, Belgium, where he authored early, sometimes criticized, historical narratives and novels. One of them, titled Le Sérapéon, received a review accusing it of plagiarizing another work, Les Martyrs, by René de Chateaubriand from 1809. Such criticisms appeared several times after its publication. 

After being ordained in Rome in 1845, he was recommended for a position in Quebec by Abbé Gingras and after a brief stay at Boston, Abbé Brasseur arrived in Canada in the autumn of 1845. Brasseur taught ecclesiastical history at the Seminary of Quebec and began researching the Archdiocese of Quebec and published a biography of Bishop François de Laval in 1846, which drew criticism from colleagues. Following this friction, Brasseur left the seminary in 1846. In that year, he initially relocated to Boston, where Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick appointed him vicar general. About a year later, he returned to Europe and while finishing a work on the ecclsiastic history of Canada (old lecture notes?) began to conduct research in Rome and Madrid on the indigenous civilizations of the Americas and begin to explore the history of the lost civilizations of the region. 

From 1848 to 1863, Brasseur embarked on extensive travels as a missionary in the whole of Mexico and the neighbouring countries of Central America. He made use of these travels to focus on investigating archaeological sites and searching for native records. In 1857–1858 he published 'Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique Centrale' (focussing on the Aztecs - note the 'civilised nations' label). It is notable that it is reported that, according to his contemporaries, the work included many specultive, controversial or even invented pieces of information. 

In 1864, due to his experience he was appointed as an archaeologist attached to the Scientific Commission of Mexico (Commission scientifique du Mexique),* a short-lived scholarly expedition embedded within Napoleon III's Second French Intervention in Mexico (1861–1867) aiming to establish a client monarchy under Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The commission (created in 1864) was modelled after Napoleon Bonaparte’s earlier scientific expedition to Egypt, it aimed to study Mexico's geography, natural history, anthropology, and ancient history while French troops occupied the territory. It conducted extensive, controversial archaeological work, treating Mexican antiquities as "loot" for Parisian museums. Brasseuer was involved in surveys of a number of sites, including highly detailed field reports on Maya ruins like Uxmal and Mayapan in the Yucatán. His resulting work 'Monuments anciens du Mexique' was published by the French Government in 1866. Alongside this activity, he also conducted research on local languages and their translations. Between 1861 and 1864, he published the fruits of these translations and collections of documents in the native languages using the Latin alphabet.

In 1862 while searching through archives at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid for New World materials, he had come across an abridged copy of a manuscript (Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán) originally written sometime around 1566 by the controversial Spanish missionary Diego de Landa, recording much information about the Maya peoples and customs, based on his own observations and discussions with Mayan informants. Brasseur de Bourbourg was particularly interested in a section in which de Landa reproduced what he termed "an alphabet" of the as-yet undeciphered Maya hieroglyphics. Realising that this could prove to be basis of deciphering the Maya script, he published the manuscript in a bilingual Spanish-French edition in late 1863 with the title, 'Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa'. Unfortunately there were severe problems with de Landa's transcription and these glyphs were not to be ultimately deciphered until the 1970s. 

In 1861, he published what he believed to be a translation of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya. He also published a grammar of Quiché Maya. 

In 1866, Brasseur de Bourbourg  had the opportunity to examine a codex in Madrid that was in the possession of Juan de Tro y Ortolano, a professor of paleography (so it received the name the Troano Codex). Brasseur de Bourbourg recognized it as a Maya script, like many others he had seen during his travels. Beginning in 1869, he attempted to translate the Troano Codex ('Manuscript Troano: Studies on the Graphic System and Language of the Maya') based on the notes by Diego de Landa, and in this work revealed his principles of decipherment. He  mistakenly viewed Mayan writing as a simple alphabet, but was, in fact, mistaken. The Maya script is a logosyllabic writing system and is built on the basis of glyphs that can express a syllable or an entire word. The result was therefore a completely erroneous and unusable translation. One of the countless errors was his conclusion that the codex described a continent called Mu that had been destroyed by a catastrophe. Brasseur de Bourbourg concluded that Mu and Atlantis were the same land, but that Mu was the correct name for it. 

A year later, another codex was found, the Codex Cortesianus. In fact, it was a little later established that both this codex and the Troano Codex had originally formed part of the same work, subsequently  renamed 'the Madrid Codex'. In fact, the content of the codex consists of approximately 250 almanacs and horoscopes intended to enable the Maya priests to perform ceremonial and ritual duties. In 1871 Brasseur de Bourbourg published his Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, a compendium of literature and sources associated with Mesoamerican studies, and his last article, "Chronologie historique des Mexicains" (1872) refers to the Codex Chimalpopoca and identifies four periods of world cataclysms that began about 10,500 BC and were the result of shifts of the Earth's axis (a concept related to pole shift theory). Brasseur de Bourbourg died in Nice at the beginning of 1874, at the age of 59.

Selected Works after 1847

[...] 

1851 - (las) Cartas para servir de Introducción á la Historia primitiva de las Naciones civilizadas de la América setentrional... (Mexico), Spanish & French translations;

1857 - Recherches sur les ruines de Palenqué et sur les origines de la civilisation du Mexique... (Paris)

1857-59 - Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique Centrale, durant les siècles antérieurs à Christophe Colomb ... (4 vols., Paris);

1861 - Voyage sur l'Isthme de Tehuantepec dans l'état de Chiapas et la République de Guatémala, 1859 et 1860 (Paris);

1861 - Popol Vuh, le Livre sacré des Quichés, &c. (Paris);

1862 - Grammaire Quichée et le drame de Rabinal Achí (Paris);

1862 - Sommaire des voyages scientifiques et des travaux de géographie, d'histoire, d’archéologie et de philologie américaines (Saint-Cloud, France);

1864 - Relation des choses du Yucatán de Diego de Landa (Paris), reproduction and translation of de Landa's work;

1866 - Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilisation du Mexique) (Paris);

1868 - Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (Paris)

1869-70 - Manuscrit Troano, étude sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas (2 vols., Paris);

1871 - Bibliothèque Mexico-guatémalienne (Paris)

Online versions of most of these can be found here

The huge amount of work he did would assure Brasseur de Bourbourg  a fine reputation as a scholar of the ancient cultures of  America. A few years before his death:

In 1869, in an article in the Revue des questions historiques, Henry de Charencey placed Brasseur de Bourbourg “in the first rank among the learned men who have most contributed to reviving among us a liking for American studies.” But later specialists were not slow to expose the unsound elements in this literary production. The contrary would have been surprising, for if Abbé Brasseur, according to the author of the biographical notice devoted to him in La Grande Encyclopédie, worked with “extreme fervour,” “he often showed, in his hastily drafted works, a lack of the prudence and sagacity” that would have ensured for his writings less fragile foundations.

Speculations on Atlantis

In his 1862 work Grammaire de la langue quichée, Brasseur first formulated his theories regarding Atlantis, in which he expressed his belief that the lost land described by Plato had existed with an advanced degree of civilization before the beginning of civilizations in Europe and Asia. He hypothesized that this civilization had served as a constant connection between Old and New Worlds during antiquity. To support this idea of historical interconnectedness, he posited that vocabulary found in various European and Persian dialects actually originated from native American tongues.

In his 1866 publication Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilisation du Mexique), he still posits that the ancient cultures of the New and Old Worlds had been constantly connected. Furthermore, to illustrate this book Brasseur de Bourbourg (or his publisher) paired his text with magnificent visual depictions by the colourful illustrator Jean-Frédéric Waldeck. Waldeck (see here, here and the book here) had been familiar with Mesoamerican art since the 1820s but seems not really to have been interested in its specific style and message. His somewhat generically neoclassist creative interpretations and stylistic additions suggest to the reader a strong link between Mayan design and the classical styles of ancient Greece and Rome. While these artistic parallels were eventually proven completely inaccurate, while they were current,** they encouraged the development of thought on ancient transatlantic contact, particularly through the mythical realm of Atlantis.

Brasseur de Bourbourg’s ideas were taken even further in his 1868 volume Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique. Here he drew extensive parallels between Maya and Egyptian pantheons and cosmologies, implying that they all had a common source on the lost continent of Atlantis. He maintained that the Mayan civilization was a continuation of the culture of Atlantis as described by Plato. He believed that one could therefore present a history of Atlantis based on his interpretation of Mayan myths, and that Maya culture in turn could be explained in terms of Plato's descriptions of the culture and society of Atlantis.

These are ideas that would be picked up in the 1880s and 1890s by Augustus Le Plongeon and appear in Ignatius Donnelly's 1882 'Atlantis: The Antediluvian World'. Later pseudo-scientists such as Augustus Le Plongeon and James Churchward would produce completely fictitious translations of parts of the codices Brasseue de Bourbourg had translated based entirely on their own imagination...


Archaeological biography

Jean-Marie Lebon 2015, 'Charles-Etienne Brasseur De Bourbourg, Premier Grand Mayaniste De France (Archaeological Lives)' Publisher Archaeopress.

see also: Quintus Curtius, 'Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg: An Early Pioneer in Mesoamerican Studies' September 29, 2017.

Katia Sainson 2024, 'The Manuscript Hunter: Brasseur de Bourbourg's Travels Through Central America and Mexico, 1854-1859' University of Oklahoma Press


Notes

* Gary S. Dunbar, “‘The Compass Follows the Flag:’ The French Scientific Mission to Mexico, 1864–1867,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, no. 2 (June 1988), pp. 229–40.

** Although photography (daguerrotype) was invented in the 1830s, it seems only to have begun to be used to document archaeological sites two decades later. The first photos of ruins in Latin America seem to have been taken 1857–1860, when Désiré Charnay conducted the first major photographic expedition documenting ancient pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico (including Palenque, Mitla, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá). These images were only published in 1863 in the landmark portfolio 'Cités et ruines américaines', introducing the real appearance of monumental Mesoamerican architecture to the global public via photography.