(1814–1874). French priest, Americanist, historian, and philologist. Brasseur was born into a family of shopkeepers in Bourbourg, a medieval town in northern France. Enthusiastic about Flanders' history, he wrote several essays about local folklore, which enabled him to enter literary circles. In 1837, during the constitutional monarchy, Brasseur came to Paris with French poet Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat Lamartine's support to work for political newspapers, among which was Le Monde, which sought the democratization of power. In 1840, he entered for two years the seminary of Ghent. He wrote moralistic novels, a success that provided him the money for his travels and his future publications. In 1845, he was ordained in Rome and went to the seminary of Quebec, where he taught church history based on Rohrbacher's works and where he tried without success to establish a Dominican monastery. Brasseur resigned from the seminary in 1846 and traveled to Boston, where he was appointed vicar-general. There he read H. H. Bancroft and William H. Prescott, whose works about the Spanish conquest of Mexico persuaded him to devote his talent to Americanist studies. He then returned to Rome, where he studied Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico, the Codex Borgia, and the Codex Vaticanus A. In 1848, Brasseur was appointed chaplain of the French legation in Mexico. There he copied many manuscripts found in the libraries or given to him by Mexican scholars. He was particularly drawn to the manuscript works by Ramón y Ordoñez, who argued that the native Americans had their origins in Chaldea (Mesopotamia). In 1851, Brasseur returned to Paris, where he became involved in French Americanist circles. In 1854, he traveled to Guatemala and was appointed ecclesiastical manager of Rabinal in 1855. There he learned the Quiché language and collected ethnographic data. In 1857, Brasseur concocted a new hypothesis about the origin of native Americans: Scandinavia. In 1859, another journey took him through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Chiapas, and Guatemala. On his return to France, he published the Ximénez manuscript of the Popol Vuh, and his Grammaire de la langue quichée, which contained the Rabinal Achi drama, as well as his first theories about the civilization of Atlantis. In 1863, he visited the Quiriguá and Copán archaeological sites. Intrigued by the inscriptions on the stelae, he stopped in Madrid on his way back to Paris to search for relevant documents. The manuscript of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán of Diego de Landa that he found there was considered by Americanists as the primary discovery of the nineteenth century. He then undertook his work on the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphic writing. In 1864, he returned to Mexico as a member of the French Scientific Commission to study the Maya area. When he returned to Europe, he located in Madrid a Maya hieroglyphic screenfold, original and unknown. Brasseur undertook its study, calling it the Codex Troano (now part of the Codex Madrid). In it, he believed he recognized the history of Atlantis, concluding that this “lost civilization” was of American origin. In 1871, he visited Palenque and decided that he had read the Codex Troano backwards. Brasseur died in Nice in 1874 after having sold his Americanist collection of books and manuscripts.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. © March 2001
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