Simon Ganneau Explained

Simon Ganneau, le Mapah
Birth Date:circa 1805
Birth Place:Lormes, France
Death Date:14 March 1851
Death Place:Paris, France
Nationality:French
Relatives:Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau (son)

Simon Ganneau (born circa 1805 in Lormes, died 14 March 1851 in Paris) was a French socialist, feminist, sculptor, and mystic.[1] [2] [3]

Like several other socialists of his time, Ganneau treated Christianity as a call for social reform.[4] He was influenced by Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Simonian philosophy,[2] particularly in viewing God as an androgynous or bisexual.[5] Ganneau's writings treat androgyny not only as a move towards religious salvation, the final stage of humanity, but also as embodying the socialist concept on unity and balance in the world.[2]

Adopting the title of the Mapah, a combination of mater and pater or maman and papa ("mother" and "father"), Ganneau presented himself as an androgynous prophet (with a beard and a woman's cloak)[6] of a new religion called "Evadaism" (French: Evadaïsme) based on his ideas for "a redefined humanity, Evadam" (from Eve-Adam) and for a new era of female emancipation, gender equality and social justice.[1] [2] [4] [7] According to Éliphas Lévi, Ganneau also claimed to be the reincarnation of Louis XVII, and his wife claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette.[6] [8]

As a sculptor and a former phrenologist, he spread his ideas via pamphlets and plaster figurines, "of strange appearance, without doubt symbolically bisexual", both called "plasters".[2] [4] His garret studio apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris functioned in the late 1830s as a salon for discussing his ideas, and he influenced many of the socialists and feminists of his time, including Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse Esquiros, Flora Tristan and Éliphas Lévi (Abbé Constant).[2] [4] [9] Ganneau contributed to Tristan's 1844 collection The Worker's Union,[4] as well as to an 1848 paper titled La Montagne de la Fraternité.[2]

Ganneau had a wife[6] and child, who was five when Ganneau died in 1851, whom Théophile Gautier took under his wing: the Orientalist and archaeologist Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau.[3] [10] [11]

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Further reading

Notes and References

  1. Julian Strube, Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 9. Jahrhunderts: Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi (2016), page 256
  2. Naomi Judith Andrews, Socialism's Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (2006), pages 40-41, 95, 102
  3. Charles Nauroy (ed.), Le Curieux (1888), volume 2, page 239
  4. Susan Grogan, Flora Tristan: Life Stories (2002), pages 193-194
  5. Sara E. Melzer, Leslie W. Rabine, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992), page 284
  6. Gary Lachman, Revolutionaries of the Soul' (2014), page 43
  7. Francis Bertin, Esotérisme et socialisme (1995), page 53
  8. [Éliphas Lévi]
  9. Stéphane Michaud, Flora Tristan - La Paria et son rêve (Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003), p. 110
  10. [André Dupont-Sommer]
  11. [Gustave Vapereau]