Marie-Félicité Brosset

Marie-Félicité Brosset (24 January 1802 – 3 September 1880) was a French orientalist who specialized in Georgian and Armenian studies. He worked mostly in Russia. Marie-Félicité Brosset was born in Paris into the family of a poor merchant, who died a few months after his birth. His mother destined him to the Church. He attended the theological seminaries in Orléans, where he studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. Back in Paris, he attended lectures delivered at the Collège de France by Carl Benedict Hase (Greek), Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (Arabic), and Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (Chinese). He was elected to the Asiatic Society in 1825. His son, Laurent, reported "...after five years of unceasing effort, he suddenly gave up.." and he burned all the material he had created. From 1826 he devoted himself to the Armenian and Georgian languages, as well as their history and culture. He had finally found his true vocation. Books, texts, teachers, and documents were all scarce, however. For his work in Armenian, he was helped by Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin. For his Georgian work, he had to create his own dictionary from the Georgian translation of the Bible, which was faithful to the Greek text. Invited to Saint Petersburg in 1837 by the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Count Sergey Uvarov, Brosset was elected a member a year later. He journeyed to the Caucasus in 1847–48. Brosset translated—and commented on—the major medieval and early-modern Georgian chroniclers. He published his work in seven volumes from 1849 to 1858. His magnum opus, Histoire de la Géorgie, was a long-standing authority on the history of Georgia. Brosset also published the correspondence between the czars and the kings of Georgia that occurred from 1639 to 1770. From 1861 to 1868, Brosset focused on his series regarding Armenian historians, but continued to work on them until 1876. Brosset wrote over 250 works on Georgian and Armenian history and culture overall. Brosset left Russia in May 1880 and retired to his daughter's residence in Châtellerault.