Jean Massin

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Massin was born in 1917 and died in 1986. For part of his life he answered to a different title than historian: priest. By the time he died, his name sat on studies of composers, chronicles of revolutionaries, and an edition of a French poet's collected works. What carried a clergyman into concert hall scholarship, revolutionary almanacs, and a poet's collected pages, and where did that path eventually end?

• 2. From Cassock To Critic

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  At a seminary in Rome, Jean Massin trained for the Catholic priesthood, a vocation he kept until 1952 despite questions about church tradition. He was close to the writer Paul Claudel, the theologian Yves Congar, and the vicar of the Parish of Saint Séverin. He then left pulpit life behind, taking up work as a critic and musicographer instead of a parish priest. That shift opened the door to a musicological partnership that would soon put Massin's name on two major reference works.

• 3. A Shared Study Of Composers

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  Brigitte Massin, born Toulemonde in 1927 and died in 2002, became both Jean Massin's wife and his co-author. Together they published two reference works of musicology in the 1950s, one on Ludwig van Beethoven and one on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Those two studies contributed considerably to a renewal of how French writers approached the history of composers.

  A television program aired on the 14th of March 1970. It highlighted the couple's approach to romantic music, the composer's psychology, and the history of his era.

  The Massins followed those early studies with Recherche de Beethoven in 1969, and later co-directed Histoire de la musique occidentale in 1977. Jean Massin also produced a three-volume history titled Histoire de la musique: de Monteverdi à Varèse, covering 1600 to 1945, published across 1977 and 1978. A further edition of Histoire de la musique occidentale followed in 1991, running to 1312 pages under the Fayard imprint. Those volumes on composers sat alongside a very different shelf of Massin's writing: books about revolutionaries rather than musicians.

• 4. Historian Of Revolution And Letters

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  Robespierre, published in 1956, was one of the historical studies Jean Massin wrote while directing a book series. He also wrote about Marat. He also produced Don Juan: mythe littéraire et musical, a 726-page collection of texts published by Stock in 1979, complete with his own introduction.

  In 1937, Massin published Cantate triomphale du Christ roi, followed two years later by Poèmes de la compassion de Jésus-Christ. He then turned to Baudelaire, publishing Baudelaire devant la douleur and Baudelaire « entre Dieu et Satan » in 1944 and 1945. Between 1949 and 1952 he published Le Rire et la Croix in two volumes.

  Almanach de la Révolution française appeared in 1963, one of two almanacs Massin wrote about the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Almanach du Premier Empire: du neuf thermidor à Waterloo followed in 1965. In 1971 he published Cadres et repères pour l'histoire napoléonienne, written together with Élisabeth Brisson. He also introduced and annotated an edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical writings, including the Confessions, published in 1955. That range, from Christ-themed poetry to Napoleonic reference books, still left one project unfinished: a complete edition of a major French writer.

• 5. Editing Victor Hugo

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  In 1980, Jean Massin directed a chronological edition of Victor Hugo's complete works, published in Paris by Club français du livre and spanning 36 volumes. That edition still stands as a reference point for Hugolian scholarship.

  A separate credit places Massin in a 1966 film as the historian. The record does not preserve that film's title or its director's name. It stands as one of the few undocumented credits in a catalogue that otherwise lists exact years, page counts, and publishers for nearly everything Massin wrote.