Lucien Jerphagnon

Lucien Jerphagnon: The Priest Who Made Rome Talk

At ninety, a decade after most historians would have stopped writing, Lucien Jerphagnon published a book called *La Sottise?* — a meditation on stupidity, mortality and spirituality that readers found as sharp and mischievous as anything from his forties. It was a fitting last act for a man who spent sixty years making the ancient world sound like it was still arguing with itself.

A Childhood Interrupted

Jerphagnon was born on September 7, 1921, the son of an engineer, Émile Jerphagnon, and Jeanne Lallemand, who died when he was six years old. He grew up between Nancy and the Lycée in Bordeaux, and his generation's defining rupture came during the Second World War, when he was imprisoned in Germany. He survived the ordeal and later folded it directly into his philosophical writing, treating suffering and the fragility of meaning not as abstractions but as things he had lived through. That war-forged seriousness sat, for the rest of his life, alongside an almost theatrical lightness of touch — the combination that would define his books.

From the Seminary to the Sorbonne

Jerphagnon's first career was not in a lecture hall but at an altar. Ordained a priest on June 29, 1950, he taught philosophy at the seminary in Meaux for a decade. In 1961 he left the priesthood and rebuilt himself as a secular academic, a decision that cost him the institutional safety of the Church but gave him the freedom to write as he pleased. He studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études under Jean Orcibal and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1965 under Vladimir Jankélévitch, one of French philosophy's most demanding and idiosyncratic minds. The apprenticeship shows in Jerphagnon's later prose: precise, allergic to jargon, and unwilling to let erudition go dull.

He held posts as a CNRS researcher and Sorbonne lecturer through the mid-1960s, then moved to the University of Franche-Comté and, from 1970, the University of Caen, where he taught until his retirement in 1984 — handing his chair, notably, to Luc Ferry, who would go on to become France's education minister. Alongside teaching, Jerphagnon served for nearly two decades as an adviser to the International Institute of Philosophy and helped found the International Center for Platonic and Aristotelian Studies in Athens, reflecting a scholarly life built as much around ancient Greece as around Rome.

Caesars, Bishops and a Reading Public

What set Jerphagnon apart from most historians of philosophy was his refusal to write only for other historians of philosophy. Across roughly thirty books, he built a body of work that ordinary readers actually bought and finished. *Vivre et philosopher sous les Césars* (*Living and Philosophizing under the Caesars*, 1980) won the Grand Prix of the Académie française and set the template: rigorous late-antique scholarship delivered with the pacing of a good story. *Julien, dit l'Apostat* (1986) took on the last pagan emperor of Rome, a subject that let Jerphagnon explore the collision between philosophy and imperial power that fascinated him throughout his career. His *Histoire de la Rome antique* (1987) became a standard popular history of the Roman world in French.

His most consequential scholarly labor was reserved for Augustine of Hippo, the North African bishop whose *Confessions* and *City of God* shaped Western Christian thought. Between 1998 and 2002, Jerphagnon served as principal editor of a three-volume Augustine edition for the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade — the closest thing French publishing has to a canonization. It was the culmination of a lifetime spent moving between the philosophical schools of pagan antiquity and the Christian thought that absorbed and transformed them, territory he understood from both sides, having been a priest before he was a professor.

A Style Contemporaries Tried to Name

Critics and colleagues reached repeatedly for the same description: a writer who paired "a swift and appealing style with the most rigorous erudition." Jerphagnon did not soften his scholarship to popularize it; he simply refused to believe that rigor and readability were opposites. He wrote about Seneca, about Julian, about Augustine, with the narrative drive of a novelist and the footnotes of a specialist, and he trusted general readers to keep up with both at once. Colleagues who knew him personally described him as cheerful, whimsical and brilliant — a bon vivant temperament that came through even in his most serious late work, the interview-based reflections on mortality he gave near the end of his life.

The Teacher Behind the Books

Jerphagnon's influence extended well past his own bibliography through the students who passed through his lecture halls. The philosopher and essayist Michel Onfray, later one of France's most publicly visible intellectuals, credited Jerphagnon directly as a formative influence, recalling him as an extraordinary teacher whose classes he fell in love with. That kind of testimony — a student naming a specific professor decades later as the reason he does what he does — is rarer than institutional honors, and it says something about how Jerphagnon actually worked in a room, not just on a page.

His institutional honors were nonetheless considerable: he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, a Commander of the Ordre des Palmes académiques and of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens and the academies of Montpellier and Caen.

Why Lucien Is Called a Genius

Calling Jerphagnon a genius stretches the word past its usual home in mathematics or invention, and no source here uses it about him directly — the praise on record is narrower and, in some ways, more interesting: colleagues called him brilliant, and a former student called him unforgettable. What his actual gift consisted of was a rare double competence — genuine command of primary sources in Greek and Latin, matched with a novelist's instinct for pace, image and voice — deployed across a sustained, thirty-book career rather than a single flash of insight. That is closer to mastery of craft than to the leap of pure originality the word "genius" usually implies; his major contributions, editing Augustine's Pléiade volumes and popularizing late antiquity, extended and synthesized existing scholarship rather than overturning it. The honest case for the label rests on durability and range: writing with equal authority and readability about Seneca, Julian the Apostate, Roman history broadly, and Augustine specifically, while still delighting general readers at ninety, is an unusual combination of longevity, discipline and charm. The honest case against it is that none of his sources credit him with a defining original theory or discovery — his genius, if the word applies at all, was a genius of transmission.

Legacy

Jerphagnon died on September 16, 2011, nine days after his ninetieth birthday, and was buried in Rueil-Malmaison beside his wife, Thérèse. He left behind a shelf of books that continue to serve as an entry point into ancient philosophy for French readers who will never open a specialist journal, and a Pléiade Augustine that scholars still consult. For a man who began his working life delivering sermons in a seminary chapel, it was a second career spent, just as insistently, making the dead speak plainly to the living.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Commander of the French Order of Academic Palms
• Held posts at Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, Marie and Louis Pasteur University and University of Caen Normandy
• Fields: history and modern Greek philosophy